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As you can see, Chris Giarrusso has been practicing his web-slingers in anticipation of his signing at the shop next Wednesday, June 16th from 11 AM - 5 PM celebrating his contribution Donny Cates’s final issue on Venom, which also happens to be the 200th Venom solo issue ever! If you can’t wait or won’t be able to make it to the event, some of the pieces above are still available for sale on Chris’s website!

Chris will be joined by our ol’ pal Smitty, Brian Smith, as we take advantage of our fully-vaccinated status and make up for lost COVID time, marking the release of Pea Bee & Jay volume 3, “Lift Off”, the latest installment of the series that’s been given the thumbs-up by Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, and kids everywhere!

The guys will be signing for FREE, but sketching and commissions will be at their discretion! We hope to see you out for this perfect kick-off to summer vacation!

I’m getting things out of the way early this week cause I’m on an unscheduled trip to New Jersey due to my grandpa’s passing on Sunday. Nothing terribly unexpected, he was 94, I may post more about it later. He was incredibly tolerant of my nerdiness despite not having much of an inclination, recording VHS tapes of Transformers and sitting through the Power Rangers movie, and he’s 100% the reason I’m a Yankee fan. He DID get way into a series of parser-based PC games called Hugo’s House of Horrors, though! He was one of my best friends.

One of my favorite things of owning my own store is getting to play with things, like the brand-new life-size Sideshow Collectibles/ Hot Toys The Child/ Grogu/ Baby Yoda figure, and then watch them go on to new homes rather than collecting dust at my house! All the LEGOs in our display cases? I built them! All the loose Transformers? I put them in robot or alt mode and back an away they go! It’s not so much a vicious cycle as a workflow!

This Saturday, May 29th - Monday, May 31st, we’ll be having a Memorial Day Sale with Buy 2 Get 1 FREE on all back issues, because, if you can believe it, Jay has even more stock in the back that needs to make its way to the New Arrival bins! The sale DOES include the Silver Age and variants boxes, but it excludes the backwall! Also, just to clarify, we’ll be open regular business hours the whole time!

One of the things almost everyone can agree on during the “return to normalcy'“ is the desire to celebrate with friends & family, and that’s just what we’ll be doing on Wednesday, June 16th from 11 AM - 5 PM with Chris Giarrusso & Brian “Smitty” Smith, as we mark the release of the 3rd volume of Smitty’s Pea Bee & Jay graphic novel series & Chris’s contribution to the landmark Venom #200!

We had a great time with Robert Venditti for the Hank Howard: Pizza Detective in Caligula’s Safe 24 hour bananza! With Bad Idea involved, you know there was bound to be hi-jinx, the kind that resulted in no less than 20 (TWENTY?!) pizzas being delivered to the Concord location, and a gloating photo (we can only assume since there was a mask involved) of Robert in front of the Papa John's next to the Greensboro store while holding a Marco’s pizza!

Upcoming Bad Ideas include a Christmas comic in July (Slay Bells), Hollywood horror (The Lot), and the continuations of Eniac and Robert’s other book from the publisher, Tankers!

On April Fool’s Day, the fine folks at Bad Idea Corp. announced that they’d be publishing a comic that could ONLY BE SOLD IN ONE 24 HOUR PERIOD, at the penalty of banishment from the Bad Idea community for violating the sales window, and it would only cost a BUCK! Surely, coming on April 1st, this had to be a joke!

But as with all Bad Ideas, they were very serious! Hank Howard Pizza Detective at Caligula’s Safe will be 16 pages, written by Robert Venditti and drawn by Stray Bullets creator David Lapham, costs you just one American dollar, and can only be purchased on Wednesday, May 12th during regular 8 AM - 8 PM business hours, or via the ComicHub portals from midnight until 11:59 PM!

To make it even better, Robert will be at the Concord store from 12-2 PM and the Greensboro shop from 4-6 PM to sign & date your copies for FREE! We’ll also have an extremely limited number of Venditti’s other Bad Idea title, Tankers #1, available for purchase. Despite this banger of a deal, as with all Bad Idea books, quantities are limited to one copy per customer!

Obviously the world was unprepared for the reception of Batman/ Fortnite Zero Point! On our side of things, we saw the lukewarm reception to Marvel’s crossover with the same game in 2020 and DC’s rush-job soliciting the series at the last minute and forcing us to commit our orders for the first four issues of the six part series before it even started, and we went semi-conservative on our orders, but still similar to what we got on Next Batman Second Son #1 and Batman the Detective #1, neither of which sold out.

But this was a different beast all together and we probably could have sold four times as many and the calls keep coming in daily, mainly from kids that we hate to disappoint! Due to this demand, we’re already sold out of first printings of Batman/ Fortnite Zero Point #2 that ships next week, and anyone that doesn’t already have it on order will have to wait for the 2nd prints that ship on Tuesday, June 1st, the same day as the 3rd printing of #1.

First printings of #3, guest-starring G.I. Joe’s Snake Eyes, and the rest of the series are still available for pre-order as of this posting, including the “Premium” variants!

Today marks four years of actual on-time new releases (208 entries divided by 52 weeks is 4)! It’s kinda a non-event because of the shutdown offsetting the actual opening anniversary (April 5th) and our grand opening anniversary (May 6th), but if we were published by Marvel, I guarantee next Wednesday's New Release Day would have at least five covers (these are the thoughts I’m left with when I’m alone at the store all day without even Lois to keep me company).

Here’s the good news: We’ve been spoiled by several fantastic new collections of everything from top-shelf, backwall silver age books to low-production fairly recent Transformers and vintage toys! We’re working as fast as we can to get them processed and put out, but make sure you’re paying special attention to the area inside and behind the counter next time you’re in!

Here’s the not as great news: We’ve done our best to stay ahead of the supply crunch spreading throughout the collectible community, and thankfully you’ve never had to go without current or silver age bags and boards when you needed them, or long and short boxes for less than a day. Unfortunately, the increased demand has caused our distributors to increase their wholesale prices to very close to our old retail prices, so we’ve had to go up accordingly, with new supply prices now posted at all three stores.