Blog

Jay and Colton are on vacation until Tuesday, Mike had his first child on yesterday morning (CONGRATS!), Bret and Kevin are holding down Winston, and Malachai and Brian have Concord under control, but all of that means that it’s just me and Austin on the homefront this weekend, so we’ll be sitting out setting up at HeroesCon 2022, but I fully encourage all of you to make a trip of it in our stead! You could even get your own pet sketched by Trish Forstner and Tony Fleecs like the one we got of Lois seen above!

In case you missed our announcement under the headline that we won the Triad’s Best Comic Book Store in the 2022 Yes Weekly Reader’s Poll thanks to your tireless support, we’re also doing a pop-up store in Nerdbombers, located at 3121 Kathleen Avenue in Friendly Center right across the street from Five Guys! We’re starting out with a brand-new Silver & Bronze Age collection and building up from there, so if you’re looking for an elusive action figure, killing time before your movie at the Regal Grande, or waiting on a partner shopping at another store in the complex, we’ve got you covered with the help of our new friend!

That’s two of the surprises I teased two weeks ago, stay tuned for one more on the way!

Still stalling!

Stephen’s So-Called Emo Life!

• Shoresy - a more Louie take on the Letterkenny dark horse, kind of like Life & Beth, also on Hulu, it’s something that I don’t know if anyone else would enjoy as much as me and Carly.

• Everything Everywhere All at Once - do yourself a favor and see it in the theater while there’s still time. Probably my favorite movie in the last six years. Maybe 18 years. Better than the other three movies I’ve been to see in the last month (Doctor Strange, Top Gun, and preemptively Jurassic World tomorrow).

• The Power of Now - the 1997 Eckhart Tolle classic, Carly was turned onto it by the Always Sunny podcast, because while Glenn, Rob, and Charlie play the worst people in history on TV, they try to be better people IRL.

This past week of releases was a bit of a phantom “fifth week”, but we’re right back to regular business if not bigger & better than before this coming Wednesday!

On the home front, we have three very special announcements coming! I can say for certain that one of them will be coming on June 15th. The second should be around that time, think our outpost at Antiques & Geeks in Asheboro, but closer to home. And the last will be announced in advance, but will take place over the Independence Day weekend.

So, yeah, plenty to talk about in the coming posts!

With things settling into a nice rhythm around the shop for the summer in the wake of school ending, Free Comic Book Day, the Buying Day, etc., I thought I’d take things back to basics and give a look into the good ol’ Stephen’s So-Called Emo Life where I talk about a few things that I’m looking forward to or enjoying outside the shop. So…

Feeling a little burnt out today after all of the excitement of the last two weekends (and I need to rest up to babysit on Saturday), so for now I’ll just share a picture I did of our younger cat, Wednesday, while we were down at the beach the week before Free Comic Book Day. Everyone knows and loves Lois, and no one fits that bill more than me, but we still have two kitties at home, too, Wednesday and her older sister Lydia (they’ve been to the store twice while we had a pest treatment done at home and they hated it), so I thought I’d work on repping them with stickers or picks soon. I did one of Lyd as well, but I failed to really capture her soul.

We’re thrilled by the response to our first ever Buying Day event taking place this Saturday, May 14th! This is something we’ve been talking about doing for years, rather than just waiting around to see what walks in the door, let’s actively invite you to bring things in, of whatever quality and in whatever quantity, with cash money in our hands and we’ll see what happens. Our Free Comic Book Day windfall mixed with working towards a Ssalefish project of epic proportions means that this is the perfect time see how it goes!

We’ve been getting quite a few questions about it, and my first impulse is to say don’t overthink it. If you have a box of toys that have been in a closet for years, or need to pair down your single issue collection to make room for all the new books you’ll be pre-ordering, or are wondering how three rooms in your house have been taken over by Funko Pops, bring them down and we’ll do our thing. If you’re looking for 80% of market value for your Hulk #181 9.0 signed by Stan Lee, that’s not really what we had in mind in this case, but we’re still interested in paying 60-70% for blue chip keys.

To help you out, here are some ground rules!

BIG WEEK! I scored the Shop Disney exclusive Ahsoka Tano Rebels lightsabers yesterday for May the 4th, I’ve got tickets to Doctor Strange & the Multiverse of Madness for tonight at 7:15, we drop off our Comics for Kids donations tomorrow afternoon, and then Free Comic Book Day 2022 on Saturday!

For FCBD, we’ll be rolling out our regular business hours of 11 AM - 7 PM, complete with FREE COMICS (each person can choose up to 8 of the 41 available titles), FREE Dewey’s Bakery cake squares (limit one per person), FREE Face-Painting by Munchie & Me, FREE Raffles taking place every hour (with an additional entry for everything $10 you spend in store), and a SALE for Buy 2 Get 1 FREE on all action figures, Funko Pops, standard back issues, and graphic novels*!

I love this portrait that Evan Harris did of me and everyone’s favorite shop dog while we took a break from processing this week’s shipment to “read” one of Lois’s favorite comics! It’ll be part of his AP Art portfolio at Western Guilford High School, and we were honored to be part of it and thrilled to have something that my mom can get printed and hang in her house for years!

Me and the gremlin are down at Myrtle Beach this weekend to charge up before we go full on into Free Comic Book Day prep next week!