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I’ve been keeping it much more quiet this time, mostly because it seems as likely to not happen as happen with another shutdown looming, but Carly and I are scheduled to return to Disneyworld in January, to get to ride Rise of Resistance this time at Hollywood Studios and take our niece Ellie to the Magic Kingdom for the first time with our sister-in-law Miranda! And maybe buy a set of Ahsoka’s lightsabers…

The image really says it all! Don’t worry about over-complicating it! As long as it’s not an unbagged new comic (or probably a variant from this week), it’s fair game! Don’t over-think it and enjoy!

If I seem a little short today, it’s cause I’m still reeling from this week’s episode of the Mandalorian, which features something that I never dreamed of seeing in live-action, and then they even managed to top that!

By the time I write next Thursday’s post, you may be up to your elbows in turkey and stuffing, so I’ll go ahead and say we’ll be open our regular 8 AM - 8 PM next Wednesday, November 25th with a full slate of new release below, then CLOSED all day on Thursday, November 26th for Thanksgiving, and open all weekend for our usual posted hours for our Black Friday sales, the details of which we’ll reveal on Thanksgiving Day!

Local Comic Shop Day, an event designed to put together unique, limited editions of comics and drive customers into brick & mortar comic shops like us, will be taking place on Wednesday, November 25th, and this year’s offerings are more affordable than ever!

One of the fond Thanksgiving traditions from my youth, like going to play Par-3 golf with my dad and Uncle Dennis, was my mom and my Aunt Karen taking the oversized edition of the newspaper stuffed-to-bust with sales circulars, like we would be later that day with stuffing, and making their plan of attack for Black Friday. In the spirit of trying to keep that mystery going until Turkey Day, we won’t fully reveal our biggest sales of the year until 24 hours before it go into effect, but rest assured that you won’t have to get up at the crack of dawn, and it will be the most unrestricted and easy-to-understand discount system we’ve ever had! It’s been a crazy year, and we’re just trying to keep it as simple as can be!

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).