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Two hundred and sixty posts divided by fifty two weeks in a year means five years of new books at Ssalefish Greensboro! We would have gotten here about four weeks sooner if not for the industry-wide COVID shutdown, but we made it anyway! And what a week to take note of it with the final issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Last Ronin, the 2nd Amazing Spider-Man debut in our tenure, the Death of the Justice League, and massive milestone issue of Thor! It’s like Free Comic Book Day week came early (but you’ve gotta pay for these)!

We’ve extended our counter by another 4” section to give us another workstation out on the sales floor, so we can be more attentive to questions and discussions than when we’re working out of our back room half of the time. Rearranging and reworking how we feature our supplies and figures, acknowledging that we still have room to improve and grow five years down this road, along with Jay and Mike, felt extremely refreshing yesterday. Sometimes it’s the little things in the retail game!

For 2022, Free Comic Book Day returns its rightful date of the first Saturday in May, which means it’s just one month from today! Marvel will have four titles instead of their usual two (including one with a first appearance of a brand-new character), DC will answer with three, and there’ll be another 39 titles for you to choose from! Add to that an awesome poster designed by our very own Austin Sellars, FREE face-painting by Munchie & Me, door prizes, sales, a matinee of Doctor Strange 2, and MORE, and you’ve got yourself the makings of one of the best days of year!

As we add to the festivities in the interim weeks, we’ll keep you updated!

We didn’t get the collection of our wildest dreams, that’s still pending. But we did get the collection we’ve spent the most money on ever, and a TON of those books are making their way to the backwall as we speak (small sampling pictured above)! In the next week we’ll be completely redoing the New Arrivals section of the back issue bins, which if you didn’t know is the first six boxes facing the door! And we’ll still have enough left over to share the wealth with the Concord store! Our cup runneth over!

Next week it’ll be turning the page to Free Comic Book Day promotion, back to its rightful date on the first Saturday of May!

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…