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So this week is an especially slow news week. Besides the regular stuff we do in the store all week, y’know, selling comics, restocking comics, all that stuff, I’ve been working on some site-based stuff that’s had me hip deep in code for the last week or so. Not necessarily redesigning the site, but before we start putting up a bunch of stuff for HeroesCon 2010 (yes I’ve noticed the 2009 dates are still listed, thank you), I wanted to spiff the place up a little bit. A lot of little things will change, and I’m going to clean up the site navigation and other little odds and ends that have annoyed me since I redesigned it back in 2007.

The big thing is that I’m going to be moving this blog onto our site proper, via the awesome and swear-inducing complexity of WordPress. We’re going to be using the blog a good bit more, providing more content from out in the comics world, more interviews like this one, more reviews, more guest blogging, etc. So while I’m still in the planning stages, I wanted to ask you guys:

What would YOU like to see on our blog? What aren’t we talking about that you’d like? What ARE we talking about that you’re tired of hearing about? While it’s true that we’re a comics shop that wants to take your money, we like you and want you to enjoy having your money taken; or if you live too far away to shop here, at least enjoy reading about us and our various opinions and connections.

Point is, a lot of what has made us so popular over the years is YOUR very kind support, so I thought I’d ask YOU what you thought. See how I’m getting YOU to do my work for me? All it takes is CAPITAL LETTERS!

Anyway, let’s hear it: post in the comments section below what you’d like to see more or less of. As long as you’re polite, I promise we are listening. And in the meantime, thank YOU for listening!

One of the cool things about working on the convention every year is getting to see some stuff well in advance of its publication. Sometimes it’s because it gets sent to us, sometimes we see it at another show, sometimes the publisher sends out advance copies to increase retailer interest.

The first time I heard about Lamar Abrams was when “Cheeky” Chris Pitzer informed me that he would be attending HeroesCon with AdHouse Books. Now, while I trust Chris above most people, I like to have SOME kind of idea of who someone is before I just throw their name up on our guest list, so Chris sent me over a pdf of the first bits of Remake, which would be published in a few months. I was down with the program pretty much from page one, although I have struggled with how to explain why—Remake is an amazing book by a breakout artist, although it has some weaknesses here and there, even if they’re mainly weaknesses born out of the enormous enthusiasm of the book.

The best and worst thing about Remake is its limitless enthusiasm and elan. Almost from the first page you can tell that Lamar Abrams is spinning these comics right out of his brain, with very little editing happening between said brain and the page. I say this as if I know: of course I do not. But I certainly got that impression, which as someone who reads a ton of comics is ENORMOUSLY refreshing. This, to me, is one of the things that really animates minicomics as an artform–the kind of egalitarian idea that says anyone can make comics any time, any way they like. And with someone like Lamar, who obviously is hugely talented, that kind of loose energy makes his comics come further alive.

It’s almost like it’s meta-funny–for instance, what is actually happening in the story rarely seems particularly important, as much as HOW it’s happening. Like in this 2-page sequence, one of my favorite of the book which had me giggling out loud in the bathroom of the Toronto Reference Library a few months ago:

“UPSLAPT” is now my favorite sound effect, complete with arrow-addition to the “U”. And how can you beat dialogue like “Oh my hand and part of my arm!” I’ll tell you how: YOU CAN’T!

The problem with Remake is really just one of format. I think what’s reprinted in the book is the original minicomics 1-3, and maybe some extra odds and ends. In small doses the lack of a gripping story is probably less evident, and you’d be free to just giggle yourself silly over the panache and flourish of Lamar’s art and dialogue. As a 150-or-so page book, it can be harder to digest as a whole. This may just be me being a format snob, OR even more likely cautioning myself to be careful when one day reprinting my own feeble minicomics. I suggest reading Lamar’s comics as they were originally published, in chunks. The book is just $12.95, so pretend you’re buying 3 $4.50 minicomics with a fancy cover and you’ll be in good shape.

Basically though, Lamar Abrams is the bomb-diggety. I have found myself looking at this book again and again–there’s something really effortless and engaging about Lamar’s comics, as if he’s channelling the kind of silly comics you’d make when you were 8, but employing man-sized talents to those comics. Result: UPSLAPT!

Oh! And while hunting images for this review, I happened on Lamar’s website, which has a ton more cool drawings and comics. I suggest you hop into that. In the meantime, you can pick up Remake from us at the store (some have Lamar drawings in them!) or from AdHouse if you are not fortunate enough to be one of our customers. Enjoy!

While you may not always know to hear US talk about it, we’re not the only game in town when it comes to local comics conventions–our buddies Dave Hinson and Rick Fortenberry have been organizing the Charlotte ComiCon, for the last few years. It’s a seasonal one-day show, with the summer installment taking place this Sunday, July 12th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Charlotte. The show will go on from 10am to 4pm, and there are a host of guests and exhibitors you can check out at the official site. Our resident tough guys Seth Peagler and Rusty Baily will be manning the Heroes booth, so be sure to drop by and slap some high-fives with those guys.

Best of all, readers of our blog and this Friday’s Heroes Hotline will get an extra bonus! You can print out the coupon below and bring it in for $1 off your ticket price! You’re welcome!

Yessirree! As reported over the weekend by me on Twitter, both in my at-work and at-home identities, as well as by numerous employees on their various social media throughout the weekend, our boss Shelton Drum pulled a fast one this weekend and got HITCHED to his lady-love Linda D’Olivat!

While some of the staff were invited to a “light dinner” at Shelton’s house Friday night, only a few of us showed up on time–it was, after all, Friday night. I, as a matter of fact, called to tell Shelton I wouldn’t be there til after 9.30, but as I listened to the phone ring I didn’t realize it was being used as a wedding iPod. So when I showed up the party was in mid-toast, everyone was pretty, er, mellow after a couple of hours of celebration, and I found myself late for my boss’s wedding!

Whoa! Fortunately almost everybody else had been surprised by Shelton’s backyard wedding/eloping trick, but once you got over the shock you realized in you were in the middle of a great big party. Super awesome, and Shelton and Linda were beaming all night–we’re all pretty excited about adding a Canadian to the store family, which makes us 75% funnier AND 125% better cartoonists by association. Also now Seth can play hockey.

Shelton’s pretty excited too–I asked him for a little quote for this announcement, and he sent me this:

It was like we eloped, but at home, and with our friends and family! It couldn’t have worked out better. The weather was fabulous and everyone was surprised and happy for us. Linda and I are looking forward to sharing many happy years together!

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in congratulating Shelton Drum and newly minted Linda D’Olivat Drum on their happy nuptials! Many happy returns!

Hey! While I’m thinking about it, I wanted to point out that our bros at the Dollar Bin podcast recorded a TON of panels at HeroesCon, which they are putting up on their site one by one. You can find them in more or less one place here, and I’ll try to update this blogpost as well. Many MANY MANY thanks to these guys, including Adam, Brian, Devin, Kris, Ted, and probably a bunch I’m forgetting. They worked super hard over the weekend, not just recording panels, but miking them and just generally being super awesome. You would be well-served to check out their podcast, whether it’s Heroes-related or not!

Okay, panels up there so far:

“New Power Generation” Panel, featuring Matt Fraction, Brian Bendis, Ivan Brandon, Jonathan Hickman, Ed Brubaker, and Matt Brady.

“DC Universe” Panel, featuring DC editors Brian Cunningham and Ian Sattler, with special guests

“Marvel Pint O’ CB” Panel, featuring Matt Fraction, Brian Bendis, Ed Brubaker, and Mark Waid

Mark Waid Interview

Well as I write it’s Thursday afternoon, and most of us have gotten our voices back and don’t groan and complain about our sore legs anymore. After months and months of hard work, HeroesCon 09 is by all accounts an unqualified success. We’ve heard pretty much 100% positive reports from all the dealers and pros we’ve talked to, not to mention from those who bought small press tables. And fans as usual have been ever-so effusive with their praise. I have to tell you right here that there is nothing NOTHING that we like better than hearing from you guys after the show–it makes all the late nights and sore legs worthwhile.

I’ll write a short con report here, but for the full story I suggest you consult the TONS of photos we uploaded to our Flickr page this week, many of which are slowly but surely being outfitted with little descriptions, etc. That will probably take awhile (there are 245 pictures so far); but in the meantime feast your peepers on this con link roundup I put up to help you out. Lots of good reports there as well–heckfire, you could burn a solid 8-hour day reading the Twitter search by itself. NOT THAT I DID THAT OR ANYTHING.

This year we were in Hall A, which posed a bit of a challenge in changing our seating plan–even more challenging when we moved things around to create a big space to hold a Red Cross Blood Drive, but I flubbed updating all the seating locations correctly. So that was the big problem on Friday, but fortunately most of the people I had to move around were very patient with me and I sure did appreciate it.

In fact, that was probably the only real problem all weekend, except that finding a particular person throughout the weekend could be tricky if they’d been moved a couple of times. Friday had a good turnout, and Saturday was great, although at first it was hard to tell–our hall this year was 20,000 square feet larger than last year’s, so at first I was worried until Shelton reminded me.

Another thing we did this different this year was to set up some stanchions where we knew there would be massive lines pretty much all weekend long, which proved to be a good decision on our part. We try to be pretty careful about no playing favorites, no “guests of honor,” that kind of thing, but when 200 people are in line, you’ve got to put that line somewhere, you know?

All in all the pros seemed to have an even better time than usual–as someone that answers maybe 75% of the complaints in the room, I just plain didn’t hear that many. Maybe people were just going over my head to complain to Shelton about me? IT WOULDN’T BE THE FIRST TIME, NOSIR. We kind of pride ourselves on our hospitality, so maybe shouldn’t feel surprised, but it’s still nice to have so many guests come up and thank us for having them–heck, it’s US who should be thanking the PROS, am I right?

All this friendly mutual-thankiness-society goodwill came to a head Saturday Night at our Annual Auction, where I started out reprising my role from last year of auctioneer, but was quickly heckled off the stage in favor of the lovely Allison Sohn, who–let’s face it–is just a better auctioneer than I am, all around. She was DYNAMITE up there–not only does she know all the artists, but all the bidders as well, and would occasional cajole them into bidding wars. I hope we can trick her into doing it again next year–this year’s auction raised an incredible 20% more than last year’s, which was already among our best ever! WHAT?! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Allison Sohn…

That’s not a great picture of her, but you can gaze on her up close in this one, in the aforementioned giant Flickr set! Anyway, after a long and successful auction, many of us retired to the Westin bar, and then magically awoke the next morning with no idea how we’d ended up back in our rooms, or even if these were, indeed, our rooms. But fortunately HeroesCon didn’t open on Sunday til 10.30 for pre-reg, so by then we were looking sharp again.

Sunday is typically the “deal-making” day of the show, as traffic is typically down from Saturday. Dealers want to haul home as little as they can, and clever dealhunters are out in force looking for bargains. This year was no exception, and even the staff had a less stressful day. We gave away a bunch of door prizes, the Quickdraw contests drew over 200 fans, the panels seemed to go off without a hitch. The most talked about panel was without a doubt Rantz Hoseley‘s unveiling of his new Longbox application, which has been compared to a kind of iTunes for comic books–the early scuttlebutt is incredibly positive, especially compared to past initiatives of this kind. There’s even rumor of interest from the “Big 4” companies, which is great for Rantz. Also talked about was the screening of the upcoming Jeff Smith documentary “The Cartoonist,” Ben Towle and Craig Fischer’s Ditko panel, Andy Mansell’s panel-by-panel look at Brave And The Bold #4 with creative team Mark Waid and George Perez. Jeez there are so many good ones, I can’t list them all.

In fact, I’d better wrap this up! For the complete skinny, check out those Flickr pictures and con links, which tell the tale better than I could. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this image from our Dead Dog Party, former employee Matt Fraction ringing up current employee Matt Knapik for a copy of Casanova. Priceless!

In true Comics Reporter style I thought I’d amass some of the links I’ve found or that people have sent me to HeroesCon reports. While I can’t vouch for the content at some of these links (I mean language, some of these guys use teetee-caca language), most of the ones I’ve looked at are pretty awesome, not to mention complimentary (that falls under the “awesome” subheading anyway).

In no particular order:

Great CLT Blog photo slideshow
CBR coverage of Rantz Hoseley’s Longbox announcement/panel
CBR coverage of DC Nation panel
Comics Reporter mid-weekend coverage
CBR talks to Mark Waid about Dr. Strange
Nick Mizgala Flickr set
Newsarama coverage of BOOM! Disney licenses
Newsarama coverage of Dark Reign panel
Newsarama coverage of Ares/War Stories
Newsarama coverage of DC Nation panel
Newsarama coverage of DC Universe panel
Newsarama coverage of Pint o’ CB panel
Comics Reporter coverage of HeroesCon and Wizard
CBR coverage of Owly on Kindle
Twitter search for #heroescon
HeroesCon Flickr group
Kivus Flickr set 1/2
Kivus Flickr set 2/2
Van Jensen on Smith/Longstreth panel
CBR on NPG
Sidebar podcast
Jim Amash blog post
Vito Delsante Vlog on FCHS
Dean Trippe photo set
Van Jensen Publisher’s Weekly con report
Creative Loafing photos
Red Moon report part 1
bodhipuff’s photo report
Alec Longstreth con report
Evan Dahm post

Okay that’s a lot of reading for you–get to work! And if you know of one you don’t see here, feel free to post a link in the comments section!

Well, I’m in the middle of preparing my con report, having already posted 245 photos to Flickr, descriptions of which are appearing as I write them. I’ll be blogging about it here as well, but in the meantime I wanted to share with you what Chuck Rozanski said in this week’s Mile High Comics newsletter.

To preface: if you’re not aware of Chuck, Mile High Comics is one of the oldest and most venerable comics shops in the country, and Chuck Rozanski is a popular face at shows all across the country. Not only because dealers love selling him back issues, but he also happens to be a cool dude, too. Here’s what he had to say–I’d just link to it instead of cutting and pasting it in toto, but Chuck’s newsletter is e-mail only as far as I can see:

“After a wonderful weekend in Charlotte, we’re now getting ready to head for the airport. HeroesCon turned out to be just as fantastic a comics convention as I had anticipated, with many thousands of fans from throughout the nation attending. While HeroesCon was originally intended as a regional convention, it is rapidly becoming an alternate destination for those dedicated comics fans who want to attend a large convention without all the media overlay that now dominates other large comics shows, such as San Diego and New York. It is a real blessing to be in a place where the vast majority of attendees are there because they love to read, as opposed to watching television, going to movies, and/or playing video games. I can pleasantly engage in all of the above on occasion, but my basic bias is definitely toward reading, so I find it quite refreshing to attend a comics convention where the entire emphasis of the convention is on comic books. Is it any wonder that HeroesCon is my favorite convention of the year?

“Aside from just having fun here in Charlotte, we also purchased a huge number of back issue comics from the dealers exhibiting at the show. This convention was really a test of our new online pricing structure, as I had to explore whether our wholesale back issue comics suppliers would be willing to lower their prices enough that I could maintain our prices at their new, much lower, levels. Blessedly, the answer turned out to be a resounding “Yes!” While I did run into several instances where I just could not work out deals with folks because they still had their comics priced at pre-recession levels, I found more than enough dealers who were willing to be flexible enough to spend my entire buying budget, and then some. I ended up buying about 30,000 back issue comics and trade paperbacks in Charlotte, including well over 10,000 Silver Age and Bronze Age comics! That was more than enough pre-1980 back issues to completely restock us from the debilitating effects on our online inventory resulting from our sales of the past two weeks, so I am feeling quite happy this morning. While there were certainly a few issues where I found out that I am going to have to raise our prices slightly over the next week in order to maintain our inventories, in most instances I am going to be able to keep our present extremely steep discounts in effect for you.

“While I purchased Silver Age and Bronze Age comics quite well in Charlotte, my assistant, Will Moulton, was also purchasing this past weekend at the WizardWorld convention in Philadelphia. Will was able to also buy about 30,000 comics (with an emphasis on issues that we’re seeking from the past five years…), but his real score was a single deal containing over 3,000 scarce and out-of-print trade paperbacks. If you’ve been looking for any books for your library, the next couple of weeks are going to be a great time for you to shop with Mile High Comics!

“I’m going to have to cut things short now, as we still have to turn in our rental van, and then head for the airport for our flight home. Before I go, however, I want to close out today’s newsletter with a special thanks to HeroesCon owner and founder Shelton Drum, and his entire crew at the wonderful Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find retail comics shop. Thanks to Shelton and his wonderful crew, we all have the opportunity each year to attend a comics convention that retains the wonder and magical atmosphere of Phil Seuling’s legendary 1970’s conventions at the Commodore Hotel in New York, and the incredible early 1980’s conventions in San Diego. Being able to step back in time, and to once again experience the joy that I felt at attending the greatest comics conventions of my youth, is such an incredible treat that I am forever their debt. Shelton, you’re the best!”

Holy Cow! What a sweet post by Chuck! Shelton was super flattered by it, especially the part about Phil Seuling and the early San Diego shows, where Shelton was set up as a young man selling comics, before he even had established Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find! Okay more con report coming soon.

[pictured at top of post, from left: Chuck, his wife Nanette, and our Warehouse Manager Seth Peagler, together in our warehouse after loadout of HeroesCon]

Okay I’ve spent most of the day answering a TON of e-mail and checking out the TON of Twitter posts and retweets and so forth regarding the show. I have to say that, while we’re all ridiculously tired, and I can barely stand up from 4 days of walking back and forth over 100,000 square feet of concrete floor, we’re incredibly encouraged and enervated at the very VERY warm and congratulatory messages we’re getting. By all accounts so far HeroesCon 09 was a huge success, which makes all the hard work over the last few months worth it!

I’ll be posting a short series of photo collections and reports over the next few days, but in the meantime I wanted to say thanks to everyone who came this year, from fans to dealers to pros! HeroesCon runs 100% on the support of our community of family and friends, and believe me we appreciate it.

UNRELATED–there was a problem last week with our server which has prevented us from being able to upload this Wednesday’s New Releases–we’re working on it and hopefully will get them up tomorrow. Sorry for any inconvenience!

I’ll leave you today with this photo in our store of employee Matt Knapik and X-Men writer Chris Claremont. Note that Matt is holding a copy of X-Men #4, the first issue after Claremont left the book back in the 90’s. It’s a nerd joke, but everyone around in the store was cracking up at this. Matt went on to explain the current X-Men continuity to Chris, which was twice as hilarious. If you’ve met Matt, you know how entertaining his explaining of anything can be, so watching him explain the X-Men to probably the best-known X-writer ever was pretty hysterical to the rest of us.