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The mission from last week’s blog, to make it to Galaxy Con in Richmond on Friday, meet Ahsoka Tano role-originator & voice actress Ashley Eckstein, get her signature, and consume $150 worth of ribs at Buzz & Ned’s, was a complete success! She was super-sweet and down to talk all things Disney before reciting the line I had inscribed on my lightsaber case in Snips’s voice!

It was weird to go to a show like that in the vein of a comic convention (I’ve never been to the Raleigh show), or about the same size as HeroesCon, and only have three comic dealers in the building, and no one be bothered by it. I guess that’s the direction these things have been going…

I’m out of town in Greenville on a big boy business trip for the first time in my life (no comics or toys involved and I don’t think I’ve ever had a whole hotel room to myself before), but I didn’t realize I was also going to get the chance to step through a time portal into a ‘90s-era Winn-Dixie when I went to the Ingles grocery store across the street from my perfectly modern hotel!

Then once I make the 200 mile trip home (with a pit stop to pick up 18 short boxes of $1 books at the Concord store) I’ll be making a 200 mile trip up to Richmond on Friday with Jay & Colton to meet Ashley Eckstein, the voice of Star Wars: The Clone Wars’s Ahsoka Tano, at GalaxyCon! Another quick out and back before getting back to the shop on Saturday!

This was probably the hardest new release wall we’ve ever put together! For a while there, I was pretty sure we’d have next week’s DC books in hand before we had the stuff should have already been on sale.

This Sunday, March 6th the shop be set up at the Greensboro Pop Culture Con at the Wyndham Garden Inn on Swing Road (off Guilford College Road) next to Cooper’s Ale House from 11 AM - 5 PM! We’ll be blowing out some overstock toys and miscellaneous items from collections we’ve picked up that never made it out to the shop! Stop by and say “hey”!

My first new guitar picks in three years, using the only decent drawing I’ve done in a year and a half, which was a rework of a drawing from two years ago!

Tomorrow I’m rolling down to Georgia to hopefully pick up a van-load of toys, so watch our Instagram and Facebook for new grails to add to you collection.

Still waiting on those other things…

It’s true, “Like a Bantha” is not as great a bop as “Seagulls” or “The Bed Intruder Song”, but it’s still been stuck in my head for the last three hours and it might be the best thing that Boba brought to his book!

We’ve shared just a fraction of the 6K books that I teased last Thursday that have made it to the wall as well as some pleasant surprises that walked in on Saturday morning! Hopefully all six New Arrivals back issue bins will be completely changed out in the next week or so. BUT, the two big moves I was alluding to are still in a holding pattern!

I just got word that we’ll be busting out some of our warehouse stock for the Greensboro Pop Culture Con, taking place Sunday, March 6th from 11 AM - 5 PM at the Wyndham Garden Inn on Swing Road, attached to Cooper’s Ale House. It’s been since HeroesCon 2019 that I took the lead on a convention, so we’ll see how I do!

So many secret plans that I can’t talk about until tomorrow! Since my post on June 13th, I’ve gone from the world being my oyster to piling my plate high with possibilities that I’m still waiting to see play out that I’m ready for another vacation or to get to getting on already!

I’ve also just caught up on the Expanse books, all of the latest Star Wars High Republic novels, For All Mankind on Apple TV+, and all my weekly shows, so, year, bring it on!

In the preview you can nab an exclusive look at some of the other backwall heat that didn’t make it to Instagram the other day: New Gods #1 first appearance of Orion, Highfather, Metron, Kalibak & Lightray, Ms. Marvel #18 first appearance of Mystique, Marvel Spotlight #32 first appearance of the first Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, and G.I. Joe A Real American Hero #21 Newsstand Edition groundbreaking Snake Eyes silent issue!

If you were in the shop earlier this week (Monday, Tuesday, before lunchtime on Wednesday) you might have noticed things were looking a little dimmer than normal with a bank of our overhead lights out. Contrary to popular belief, we were not invoking a coffee shop ambiance (though we didn’t hate it), the lights were just the next thing to show their age as we roll towards our 5th anniversary this spring. Fortunately, my dad is best and can figure anything out, going straight from buying me breakfast at Waffle House to spending four hours getting to the bottom of our little problem!

Now we’re shining bright!

The second job I had in the comic retailing game was bagging a mountain of comics (like, seriously more than 10,000) destined for the back issue bins of another store in town for trade credit. The first thing that caught my eye on my first day was an X-book that looked unlike anything I’d ever seen: lush, sexy, and busting with energy, at least a decade ahead of its time, about a team of mutants putting their lives on the line for the glitz & glam of reality TV. From that moment on I stopped measuring my time in dollars and only focused on the seconds I needed to “buy” the next issue.

That book was X-Force #116 by Peter Milligan & Mike Allred, and that book lead to X-Statix, and my appreciation of Nick Dragotta and Paul Pope and Darwyn Cooke and Nick Derrington (unknowingly), and spontaneous road trips to Raleigh for DC Solo issues, and buying every copy of the X-Statix omnibus I could find on clearance (now a very expensive item on the secondary market) and giving them as gifts, and now X-Cellent, out next week.