Blog

Don’t miss out on your chance this week to get your hands on a FREE Spawn head sketch by Chris Giarrusso when you pick up the New Spawn U title Monolith (or Rat City if a 2099 Spawn is more your speed)! In addition to a new printing of his classic Mini Marvels and the brand new sequel to Office Clawsome: Lobster Cop, Crime Across Time, Chris also has a variant to Venom War on the way!

If you missed your chance to meet him at Free Comic Book Day two weeks ago, you can catch up with him at HeroesCon 2024, taking place June 14th-16th at the Charlotte Convention Center (and Ssalefish will be set up there, too)!

I want to start out this week with a HUGE thank you for everyone that came out for Free Comic Book Day 2024! We were completely blind-sided by the construction taking place in our parking lot in the week leading up to it, and when the rain that morning kept pouring off our tents, I had no clue how we were going to accommodate everything we had planned inside the store.

But Jay, his wife Lex, and my wife Carly kept their heads on straight and came up with a killer plan that went over like gangbusters! Hopefully you had as good a time as we did and are now pumped for everything the Energon Universe, Absolute Point, Bloot Hunt, the Ultimate Universe, Jason Aaron’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more storylines and publishers have in store for us throughout the rest of 2024!

If you’ve been by the store already this week, it’s impossible to not notice that our landlords chose the worst possible time of the year to escalate their war against any remaining patch of grass in the shopping center, bringing out bulldozers, backhoes, and cement mixers to obliterate the lawn in front of our storefront and Papa John’s to eventually make room for more parking spaces.

But never ones to make our problems your problems, Free Comic Book Day 2024 will continue as planned this Saturday, May the 4th (be with you) from 10 AM - 6 PM despite the mess (and forecast)! Our guests Becka Seashols, Matthew Roberts, Chris Giarrusso, and Brian “Smitty” Smith will be perfectly safe inside with the Dewey’s cake squares, we’ve got our tents to cover the $1 comics and free books on the sidewalk, and the Buy 2 Get 1 FREE sale on graphic novels, toys, and back issues is good inside the store!

See you there!

I completely free-handed the Mickey on the back of the Starcaster with the Posca marker, the only image that wasn’t done with an Illustrator/ Cricut stencil, repping my status as a Disney adult. And now I can reveal that my next trip to Disney will actually be to Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea in October!

That’s right, as a joint 40th birthday party (mine in July 2024, hers in May 2025), Carly and I are going on a twelve day trip to Japan, visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, which will also be the first time I’ve missed processing a weekly shipment since July of 2018! There’s plenty of time for planning and I’m sure by that point you’ll all be in great hands with Austin, Mike and Jay.

Today marks the 7th anniversary of the ol’ First Look blog, and we have some very cool titles to spotlight that tie into our upcoming Free Comic Book Day festivities on Saturday, May the 4th (be with you)!

Image Skybound artist Matthew Roberts, so far best-known for Manifest Destiny, is launching the new Universal Monsters mini series, the Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives, and he’ll be joining us again for FCBD this year! The previous Dracula book was excellent, and we can’t wait to see what Matt brings to the new title!

And then local hero and FCBD guest Chris Giarrusso has a new printing of his ever-loving Mini Marvels strips as well as the brand-new all-ages sequel Officer Clawsome: Crime Across Time! He’ll be happy to sign both when he comes by on the big day!

Congrats to my brother and sister-in-law for welcoming into this world my second niece, Quinn Rue Mayer! This is the first child they’ve had since they’ve lived in NC and therefore she became the tiniest baby I’ve ever seen in person when we stopped by yesterday and she was still less than 48 hours old!

Stephen’s So-Called Emo Life!

• MLB the Show ‘24 - pretty much the only reason I keep GamePass on my X-box for half the year is that it costs the same as if I purchased the Show on its own.

• Star Wars High Republic Defy the Storm - hasn’t been my favorite entry in the era, but it’s just because everything feels like it’s on hold until the Stormwall falls, wherever that will happen.

• Ghosts Series 5 - I know the American remake has been super-successful on CBS, but for me & Carly it’s only about the original and we finally broke down and paid for the newest season on iTunes rather than try to figure out how a VPN works.

Free Comic Book Day, the most exciting day of the year, is just one month from today, falling on May the 4th be With You (Saturday, May 4th) for the first time since 2019! In addition to picking out eight comics from the 50+ available titles absolutely FREE, you’ll receive one FREE raffle ticket for hourly drawn prizes (plus an addition ticket for every $10 you spend in the store)! We’ll be running our classic Buy 2 Get 1 FREE sale on all graphic novels, toys, and back issues, and our always amazing Warehouse Stock of $1 comics will be available for your perusal on the sidewalk!

We’ll also be hosting signings with Matthew Roberts, artist on Skybound’s Manifest Destiny and the upcoming Universal Monsters Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives, Chris Giarrusso, creator of Officer Clawsome: Lobster Cop and Mini Marvels, and Becka Seashols, proprietor of the Art of Cute!

We hope you join us in celebrating the 7th anniversary of our grand opening!

Hop by the Greensboro store any time between now and Easter Sunday (March 31st, when we’ll be open regular 12 PM - 5 PM business hours), make a purchase, and pick out an egg for a sweet treat inside each one, plus the chance for FREE back issues, additional in-store discounts, and gift certificates in several extra-lucky capsules!

Today is also Opening Day when the Yankees will be taking on the dreaded Astros! To celebrate, here’s the spotlight of The Captain, the logo, and the new captain forever enshrined on my Starcaster, which is just as good as Monument Park, right?

I’m consoling myself over denying my man-cave the addition of the HasLab Ghost Trap & PKE meter by making the AMC Theaters exclusive Trap popcorn bucket my must-have item of Spring 2024, so much so that I’m going to go buy it at the AMC in High Point and then drive back to Greensboro to actually watch the movie using my Regal Unlimited pass. Ghostbusters Afterlife was the first movie I saw back in theaters post-but-still-in-the-pandemic-cause-I-still-had-to-wear-a-mask-in-the-theater, and even though it got a little overly sentimental near the end, I’m fine with it in my head-canon in a Force Awakens kind of way.

Plus Doop is very Slimer-like! I based the Starcaster Doop off of a sketch that Darwyn Cooke did in my X-Force: Famous, Mutant & Mortal hardcover during my first San Diego Comic Con in 2009. It was trickier having to create the eyes and X out of negative space since his original was all hollow lines. Some of the smaller lines closed up on me and botching Darwyn’s signature to the point that I covered most of it with a blue accent was one of the few regrets I had with the finished product.