Blog

We’re coming up on the end of the forced remodel project, but in order to sure things up above our heads, we’re going to be CLOSED on Monday, July 19th all day while they replace the ceiling and begin laying down the new floor! Though everything will be covered, the contractors tell us there’s no telling what ends up coming down once they start moving tiles that haven’t budged in a decade, and we believe them. We’ll still be open regular hours on Sunday, July 18th from 12 PM - 5 PM, and we’ll be right back to work with DC new releases ready to go at 11 AM on Tuesday, July 20th!

Munchie & Me Facepainting will be joining us for Free Comic Book Day 2021 from 11 AM - 3 PM on Saturday, August 14th! They were a HUGE hit at Halloween ComicFest 2019, and they’ve only taken the time since them to bring their craft to a whole other level!

By the time I post next week, we’ll be less than a month out from the rescheduled Free Comic Book Day, which will be Greensboro’s fifth, Concord’s first, my 15th as retailer, and my 16th I’ll have attended (it was 2006’s X-Men/ Runaways written by Brian K. Vaughan that put it on my radar)! Even though it’s not as familiar as the “First Saturday in May”, DC breaking away from Diamond Comics means that there will be more titles available than EVER, with Diamond curating their usual 50 titles and DC showing they still have skin in the game with four of their own from Lunar! We’ll be announcing guests and events over the next few weeks at all of our locations, but right now I’ll tell you that we’ll be having our first sale in almost six months, with Buy 2 Get 1 FREE on everything in the store except supplies, new comics (not bagged & boarded), and the backwall (must be within the same category, no mixing & matching, so 3 graphic novels, 3 action figures, etc., NOT a graphic novel, a figure, and a poster)!

Saturday will be my 10th wedding anniversary (we started dating 16 1/2 years ago)! I don’t pretend to have any secrets to making it work. I’m 100% the person that orders the gift for an occasion the day of and forwards the confirmation email when the time comes. I don’t see any point in flowers. I leave half the conversations when she calls me on her lunch break with an expletive, hanging up to deal with some developing crisis right in front of me. I may or may not have thrown uncooked bacon at the wall on Sunday because there wasn’t a clean pan to put it in.

But I think the last five years have been a whole lot better than the first five. We thought we’d never move out of our townhome, which was way too small for two people, two dogs, two cats, and the potential for kids, and now we’ve got four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, and an acre of land to spread out on. I don’t think either of us thought we would ever leave the jobs we had in 2016, and now the store just finished its best quarter to date, my side hustle is going strong, and Carly will be starting a new job next month. We lost the two pups we had when we got hitched, but we lucked into Lois, the cats come around sometimes, and we get to dote on our niece and nephew multiple times a week. And we’re addicted to Disney.

I know none of that would have been possible without her. We’re going to Carowinds!

This week’s unexpected nonsense included the worst leaks we’ve ever had in the shop. Obviously, ideally, this would never be something we would have had to deal with, paper and water don’t mix after all. However, the hailstorm in early May damaged the 20+ year old roof of the shopping center beyond repair and things have been escalating with every drizzle, dew & downpour ever since. Tuesday morning, as I was sorting the Lunar & Diamond shipments, the skies opened up. I described it to Jay & Bret as sounding like a shower was running in the back room (the second picture above is the ruined stack of $400 worth of T-mailers, and the 6th is where I collected more than 3” of water in just over an hour). The plastic sheeting that had been put over the spots in the ceiling where tiles had already collapsed became water balloons that filled to bursting and then splashed down onto the Pops and New Release Wall. And all over, either real or imagined, we heard tell-tale plunking above the back issues, the Backwall, the register, everywhere. It kind of felt like when our 4th of July Sidewalk Sale was monsooned out in 2019, except there was no shop to run to for cover.

We’re all healthy and safe personally, we never had to close to the public, and all-in-all we didn’t lose enough product to even make it worth filing an insurance claim. A new temporary roof sealant has been put into place and we’ll soon get a new permanent covering. On Monday, demolition will start to replace the ceiling, which will become white instead of black to the delight of Ultimate Comics owner Alan Gill who has always said that was the only dark mark on our image (pun intended), and the floor that Jay & I put down ourselves over a grueling two days in 2017. It’s going to be a bumpy few months, but if there’s anything we’ve learned over the last 15 months, it’s how to be adaptable, and I had already been thinking about ways we can glow-up for our five year anniversary, so this is the kick in the pants we needed!

You may have noticed a few ceiling tiles missing and the occasional bucket strategically positioned around the store, and it is true that we’ve had several borderline disastrous leaks since the wicked hail storm at the end of May, but our landlord is finally on it and we’re hoping we’ll be back to business without the constant hum of industrial dehumidifiers again sooner rather than later!

The exterior roof, interior drop ceiling, and floor will all be replaced in the coming months, we’re hoping with minimal impact to regular business hours and practices, but we’ll let you know through the usual channels if anything changes.

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!