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Before we close out the first week of the new year, it’s time to look back on some of the big books we bought successfully and sold safely throughout the crazy year! And this is just Greensboro, while we navigated the global pandemic like everyone else, didn’t attend any conventions other than Mask-Con, and opened another store in Concord! There are so many more pictured that I didn’t even list! And odds are I forgot to take a picture of some stuff or already deleted the pictures! If one of them went to your home, speak up!

Just a sampling: Amazing Spider-Man #300, Amazing Spider-Man #361, Batman Beyond #1, Edge of Spider-Verse #2, House of Secret #92, Strange Tales #110, Ultimate Fallout #4, and X-Men #94! Read on for more!

We’re starting off the new year with a slight change to our hours, just closing an hour earlier on Friday and Saturday night at 7 PM. That’s it!

It will come as no surprise to anyone that this has been our most challenging year in business so far, but it may shock you to find out that it was also our most profitable, and that’s thanks to all of you for sticking with us before, during, and after the mandatory shutdown!

Lots of good news to make your holiday this week even better!

There’s still time to shop with us before Christmas! Jay & Hannah will have the shop open tomorrow, December 24th, Christmas Eve, from 11 AM - 2 PM if you need help with last minute stocking stuffers, gift certificates, or something to knock the socks right off of your loved one! Even though we’ll be CLOSED on Friday, December 25th for Christmas, that will be IT for disruptions to our schedule for the foreseeable future, business as usual for New Year’s Eve & New Years Day!

Also, there’s no “skip week” this year, and we’ll have a full slate of new releases from Lunar (DC) and Diamond (everyone else) on the usual days next week, and you can check out all of those titles below!

And there’s one more surprise you’ll have to wait for Friday to unwrap!

Very happy with the way the new Ssalefish shirts from Open Eye Printshop, and even happier that it doesn’t feel like I’m excluding Concord when I would wear the Star Wars-themed shirt from last year every day! They’re priced as cheaply as possible at $15, they’re super soft, and they’re available in SM-4XL!

Carly and I have been trying to get in the holiday spirit more this year by watching holiday movies beyond our traditional screening of Love Actually while we decorate the tree. So far we’ve seen Happiest Season on Hulu, Diehard (the first time all the way through for both of us), Eight Crazy Nights for the last night of Hanukkah tonight, the new season of The Movies That Made Us about Home Alone and The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Great British Bake-Off holiday specials, the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special (about as inane and canonical as the live-action one), Godmothered on Disney+ (might not have even originally been a Christmas movie), and the Disney Holiday Sing-A-Long.

I think I’ve mentioned before that in my opinion Saturday Night Live is at its best in the week’s leading up to Christmas, with classics like Serial - The Christmas Surprise, NPR’s Delicious Dish, and I Wish It Was Christmas Today, and they wasted no time this year with a send-up to Eminem’s “Stan”!

New Ssalefish t-shirts will be available at all three stores by this time next week! I’m very excited to change up my everyday repertoire since I’ve pretty much just been rocking the same Star Wars-style shirt from last year non-stop!

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!