Hey, Folks!
Huh. It certainly is foggy out there this morning! I felt like I woke up into a Stephen King novel. Seriously, it was of course still dark out when my alarm went off and I went about my morning schedule predictably enough by feeding the Pooh Bear, letting him outside to go pee, brewing a pot of coffee, firing up the news on the computer. Then, while I was sipping on my second cup of “strip your guts” coffee, I looked out the window in the grey dawn and all I saw was a fluffy wall of white outside the back window. I got up and went over to the window to see if I could pierce the unrelenting murkiness and half expected a giant tentacle to wetly slap against the window. I eventually made my way out the door and then proceeded rather carefully on the route to the store. I made it one piece, but thank goodness I take the same route every day…I’m not sure I could find my way here otherwise.
December continues to be a rather frustrating month for D.C. titles. I’m speaking, of course, of the current Justice League crossover story, Endless Winter. As I may have mentioned last week, I severely underestimated the enthusiasm for this storyline and, if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t really expect it to be as good as it actually turned out to be. I ended up ordering all of the different parts to the story based on sales of the previous issues as is my usual habit, but clearly I should have bumped everything up a notch or two in order to cover the possibility that it was a bigger hit than expected. Let me stress that this one is completely on me. To my credit, I did assume that D.C., as well as outgoing distributor UCS, would end up overprinting a bit to cover this eventuality, but I was incorrect and, as a result, the store is going to be hard pressed to cover all of the requests for these issues. I even checked upcoming D.C. distributor Lunar and they are apparently sold out as well. So, I’m sorry if you end up missing a chapter (or two) of Endless Winter. I hate to even suggest it, but if you need to catch up on a part you missed then you can download the issue from Comixology. Again, so sorry for the mistake!
Robert Kirkman is at it again and in the best possible way. I’ll admit that I’m a big fan of Kirkman, not only for his generally excellent comics, but also by the way he continues to help out the comic retail industry in new and interesting ways. He overshipped us Walking Dead issues when he knew we were going to be caught underordered due to some plot twist, after the Spring shutdown he sent us free copies of an all-new Walking Dead story for us to sell to help get back on our feet, he slips in little variant foil covers for us to make a little extra cheddar, and now he’s at it again with a surprise new drop of a comic at this point only known as Solid Blood #17. I noticed it yesterday when I took a look at the invoice for next week’s books in order to get the shipping list together. It’s listed as a “free/promotional comic” item on the invoice and we have a total of 15 copies coming in the door. When I had a spare moment, I poked around the internet and found precious little information about it. I wasn’t even sure if that was even the actual title of the book or if it was another blind tease. The other comic retailers were speculating wildly about the possible contents, but no one had any clear idea of what this was about. Eventually it came out that this apparently a comic book from an alternate universe that was talked about between frequent collaborator Ryan Ottley and Kirkman. I’m still not absolutely sure if that’s the truth or another weird tease, but I am very interested to see what gets pulled out of the box on Tuesday.
In any case, after a bit of deliberation, I’ve finally decided on what to do about the conundrum of how to make them available to our customers. I decided fairly early on not to put it on the subscription form, mostly because I had no official cover image and, as I mentioned above, I can’t be sure if that’s even the actual title of the project. With only 15 copies coming in we are obviously going to have more demand than we will copies. It also opens the door to any number of speculator inquiries. I even checked on e-Bay and Midtown Comics to see what other people are asking for it. The answer heartened me and finalized my decision. There is only one copy currently of eBay, marked up for charity sales, and Midtown is only charging cover price (of course, I’m sure they have many, MANY more copies than I do, but that’s only fair as I’m sure they have a much larger customer base.) So here’s what we are going to do. I’m going to put the copies we have out on the new release rack Wednesday morning, limit them “one per customer”, and sell them on a first come, first serve basis. I figure this is fairest thing I can do at this point. I’m also expecting that more copies will eventually be available for reorder although at this point there is no way for me to confirm that in Diamond’s system. So if you are interested in checking out a copy of Solid Blood #17 it will be out on the new release rack on Wednesday morning!
The slow takeover of the shop is proceeding apace. I ordered and received my new Square cash register this week. I haven’t unpacked it completely yet, but I am looking forward to plugging it in and playing with it a bit to see how it works. Hopefully there will be no surprises and I will have an easy opening on January the 2nd. If, however, you come in on the 2nd and see me crying behind the counter while helplessly pushing buttons you’ll know that something is amiss.
I will be out of the office on Sunday this week. This will be my last unscheduled day off for the rest of my tenure as Steve’s employee and I’m going to spend it making Christmas cookies with a friend of mine and her young niece. I’m kind of looking forward to having an entire day set aside for baking and I think I will finally have enough time set aside to decorate the cookies properly. Because of the current covid crisis I won’t have a big plate a cookies set out this year for my beloved customers. Instead, I’m going to try to come up with some gift bags of cookies to hand out this year instead of the usual. Usually I have a selection of fun cookie options, but because of lack of time to properly prepare this year I do believe that I will have sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies. Let’s see how much baking I can knock off in one day!
I hope that everyone has a great weekend! I also hope that no one gets snatched up by barely seen tentacled monsters in the mid-morning gloom!
Eddie