Blog

What am I up to? Oh, just obsessing over one of Allan Corona’s new creations over at Thalassa Custom Basses, a replica of Matt Skiba’s Jazzmaster, which would be my 10th guitar. I need another like I need a hole in the head, but when I get like this I can’t help scheming what I could sell to pay for it, or how many relatives I could talk into pitching in instead of buying me Christmas gifts, or how good I need to be for the next two months for Santa to bring me one.

It feels completely out of control, but I try to write it off as still be passionate about things, like when I woke up extra early one morning on my day off twelve years ago and when to every comic shop in Raleigh (cause I’d already exhausted every one in Greensboro) digging through boxes until I found a copy of Mike Allred’s issue of Solo. Or mentally manifesting the first volume of the Absolute Planetary to be at the Record Store by my grandparents’ house in New Jersey.

While Diamond and publishers understandably aren’t supporting a Halloween ComicFest event this year due to already taxed distribution systems and concerns over large gatherings of people, we couldn’t let a Halloween that falls perfectly on a Saturday pass us by without marking the occasion! So we’ll be putting up the tents in front of the Greensboro store, bringing out the 80 short boxes of $1 comics from Mask-Con 2020 plus another 33 long boxes of brand-new bargain books, and letting y’all have at it from 10 AM - 4 PM!

I feel like I should be making a bigger deal about this post since it lines up with blink-182. I did listen to the new episode of Chris DeMakes a Podcast featuring “What’s My Age Again” on the way to work this morning, and I’ve got my cheap acoustic with me here in Concord, so I guess that will have to do for now!

After last week’s elemental fiasco, it’s looking very much like Mask-Con 2020 will be a GO for Saturday, October 17th! We couldn’t have spread the word as far and wide as we have (The Winston-Salem Journal, The Greensboro News & Record, The High Point Enterprise, WFMY News 2, and the most successful Facebook posts we’ve ever had) or even had the germ of the idea to pull it off without Joe Scott. And we couldn’t have muscled through the 30,000 book collection that we’ll be rolling out at our booth without the precision and boundless love of comics of Xylon Otterburn, who I met 13 years ago sitting cross-legged on the floor of a comic shop reading a book that was probably too extreme for his age.

We understandably missed out on setting up for Twin City, HeroesCon, Baltimore, NYCC, Greensboro Comicon, and two NC Comicons this year, so we’re pumped to bring all of that energy and mix it together with a Fall Fest or pumpkin patch for one day of semi-normalcy on a larger scale!

Leave it to 2020 to continue to disrupt the best laid plans. Despite our hopes that a shift in the winds would let us squeeze the show in this weekend, it seems the aftereffects of Hurricane Delta are giving a more than likely forecast for rain for Saturday, so we’ve decided to move Mask-Con 2020 to our alternate date of Saturday, October 17th.

All set-up times, show hours, paid admissions, and tables fees will be moved that date, for which the current forecast is 73 and partly cloudy).

Mask-Con 2020 grabbed some “ink” on Bleeding Cool earlier today, and we’ve filled up with over 50 dealers and are now taking on a waitlist! The 10-day forecast is showing 72 and partly cloudy, perfect October weather, and Mama Crockett’s Cider Donuts will be out there at the Lexington Cinema at 8 AM on Saturday, October 10th. It’s the making of a perfect fall day here in the Carolinas! You can still pre-order your tickets here on the site!

We’ve got a collection winging its way from New York City as we speak, two boxes so loaded with all killer and no filler that we’ll pretty much be able to replace our entire backwall! So that everyone has fair warning and the same shot at them, we’ll be rolling them out on Tuesday morning along with our DC new releases!

Officially starting up the engine on the hype-train for Mask Con 2020, taking place Saturday, October 10th at the Lexington Cinemas new drive-in theater facility! That’s right, it’s OUTSIDE (with a rain date of the following Saturday, October 17th), and we’ll have a brand-new 30,000 $1 book collection out for sale among the 25 other (and counting) dealers!

Tomorrow morning, we say goodbye to my third oldest friend (behind Carly and Tyler Klein), my beautiful brown-eyed girl, Maeby. We got her on Carly’s 21st birthday, and even though I acquiesced to her extravagant gift request by finding the ad on Craig’s List for free puppies, I made it clear that she would by my dog, if we broke up, she would come with me. Fortunately neither of them has left my side for the last 15 years.

While a mainstay at my old place of business on Wednesdays and Saturdays, she was an infrequent visitor to Ssalefish because her ever-shedding hair didn’t work with our light floors and the older she got, she became more and more unsteady and uncomfortable on slick surfaces, but she still loved meeting everyone she could on Halloween ComicFest and Free Comic Book Day.

I’m keeping it short today cause I’m already mulling over next week’s more timely post. Feels weird to be blogging in Greensboro after about four months of Thursdays spent down in Concord, but Colton asked me to kick off the weekend for him tomorrow instead so he could take his lady out for a nice birthday dinner, probably at Uncle Julio’s in Chapel Hill.

An all-time favorite game of mine that also happens to be comic-adjacent is finally coming out on the current console generation, including Switch, this Christmas, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World!