YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE:

The week of Christmas we will be receiving new books on Friday, Dec 28th; bring your Christmas money!

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE:

The week of New Year’s, we will be receiving new books on Friday, January 5th; bring your New Year’s money!

THAT IS ALL.

[Apologies To John Hodgeman.]

Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find will be hosting its very first Manga Night on January 14, 2008, from 7-9pm! This is sure to draw fans of manga and anime from all over the Charlotte metro area–come out and meet others that share your passion for manga! There’s sure to be a ton of discussion, not only of existing mangas, but hot new upcoming titles. And not only that but just to sweeten the pot we’ll be:

— offering 10% off of ALL regularly priced mangas in stock (15% for reserve customers)!
— making available our giant stock of half-off and $2 mangas!

ALSO, we’re instituting a new policy for ordering mangas. From now on, Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find will offer 10% off to anyone pre-ordering a manga through us! This only applies to books that have not initially shipped yet–whether you order it through Previews, or just tell us you want a copy of the new Naruto that ships next week or whatever; we’ll give you a coupon you can redeem for 10% off that item when it comes in!

AND FOR ITEMS THAT HAVE ALREADY SHIPPED, if we don’t have it and you want us to order it for you, we’ll give you 5% off that item! This is not only our way to say “thanks” for buying your manga with us, but also to expand our audience out into the city a little bit–so tell your friends! From now on, it’s cheaper to buy manga at Heroes!

SO LET’S SUM UP these two big develops for readers of manga:
1) We’re holding a special Manga Night on January 14, from 7-9pm, where all the manga will be on sale, there’ll be a ton of deep-discounted manga available, AND you’ll be able to meet and discuss manga with fans from all over the region!
2) We’re instituting a new policy, effective immediately, that saves you 10% off any manga you preorder with us, and 5% off any manga you reorder with us.

Dō itashi mashite [You’re Welcome]!

2007 is at an end, so now it’s time to take a look back at some of the groovy grooviness that was this year.

Best Ongoing Series: New Avengers
It’s really hard to pin down why this series is so enjoyable, especially post-Civil War. I know that it’s not the best series on the racks but…it’s just really really fun. It just revels in its tongue in cheek humor without undercutting its dramatic moments. Whenever I’m done reading it I have a big grin on my face and can’t wait for the next issue which is what one really wants from their comics.

Best Mini-Series: 52
52 was an amazing series both in terms of story and the fact that it all shipped on time. Even better was the fact that it had pretty much a perfect ending. When it was done I think the fans, the writers, and everybody in between felt proud to have been part of this series.

Best Mature Series: Scalped
This series is a combination of The Departed and The Sopranos set on an Indian reservation. It started out pretty average but by the third issue this series hit its stride big time and is becoming an epic tale of crime, redemption, and regret. Catch this one while it’s still in its early stages.

Best Collection: Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus
This was hard to pick, especially with the Fourth World Omnibus and Ed Brubaker’s Captain America Omnibus out as well. But it’s a massive book, with the entire Lee/Ditko run. Spidey at his best, man; Spidey at his best.

Best Comic Book Movie: 300
This movie was like getting punched in the face in a good way. Where you spit out a tooth and say “Yeah, I’ll have some more of that and some figgie pudding please.” That’s how you feel like 10 minutes in.

Other Stuff:
Best Crossover: Sinestro Corps War
Best Single Issue: Sinestro Corps Special
Best Comeback: All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder (this series is twisted)
Best Licensed Book: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8
Best Hero: Iron Fist
Best Villain: Iron Man (The jerk store called, they said they were out of him!)

While my work at Heroes usually keeps me in the warehouse, I’ve been a loyal customer for over 17 years and have been turned on to great books by the staff over the years. So I thought I’d share some of my suggestions for not only the holidays, but also items worth checking out at our upcoming sale (December 1-2 for those who may have forgotten). Similarly to my Heroes colleagues, I thought I’d break down my suggestions into groups and focus on specific genres.

For fans of crime fiction, there’s definite worth in checking out any of the “100 Bullets” storylines or trade paperbacks. High on my list is volume 5, “The Counterfifth Detective,” my favorite storyline thus far. Also recommended is “Scene of the Crime: A Little Piece of Goodnight.” This one’s especially a good idea for fans of Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark‘s current run on Daredevil, as they both collaborate on this book from a few years ago.

For fans of cosmic superheroes, I’d recommend the recently completed “Silver Surfer: Requiem” series. Brought to life by J. Michael Straczynski and Esad Ribic, this mini series follows the pattern of “The End” books that Marvel Comics has released in recent years. Though never overtly called “The End,” the story follows the last days of the Silver Surfer and reminds us of the character’s greatness and nobility.

Good suggestions for those enjoying comic strips or archival reprints are Drawn and Quarterly’s “Walt and Skeezix” compilations. These reprints of the long-running “Gasoline Alley” comic strip feature great art from creator Frank King, and offer an accurate glimpse of day-to-day life in the 1920’s. It’s also important to point out that this series takes place in real time, so characters age and progress as anyone would over time, something rare for comics and comic strips.

Horror fans should consider looking at “Baltimore,” the recent illustrated novel from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and co-writer Christopher Golden. Mignola has long been known for incorporating elements of folklore and classic horror into his work. This novel is no different, and effectively puts a new twist on vampire lore and vampire hunters, while still retaining the gothic tone tone of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

Western fans are wise to find “Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex,” DC’s black and white reprints of the early appearances of their famous western hero. Featuring work from comic legends Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, among others, this affordable collection gets you over 500 pages of classic comics for under $20.00, a deal hard to pass up for any fan of westerns.

Those preferring their comics a little more psychological should seek out Grant Morrison’s run on “Doom Patrol.” Written before his runs on “JLA,” “New X-Men,” “Seven Soldiers” and “All Star Superman,” “Doom Patrol” follows bizarre characters with strange powers (or situations) as they face threats with names like Mr. Nobody and the Brotherhood of Dada, among other odd creations.

Fans of indy, or non-superhero books might enjoy Alex Robinson’s “Box Office Poison,” the recent reprints of “Love and Rockets,” or any of Chris Ware‘s excellent offerings from “Acme Novelty Library.” While each of these series are very different, they all deal with humans who are neither super nor powered, but all the more interesting because of that fact.

Those are just a few brief ideas for the holidays. Enjoy.

Okay, so I’m not sure how many of you out there know about this, but it’s double-definitely worth checking out. Sam Hiti–whose book Tiempos Finales I recently reviewed–does a thing on the side called Fistacuffs, which is a gladiator-style cartoonist-on-cartoonist tournament. Basically, cartoonists whip up completely original characters and pit them against each other anonymously, with participants and some viewers voting on the outcome. Some pretty big names have contributed fighters in the past, including Guy Davis, Paul Pope, Kagan McLeod (one of my favorites!), and a TON of others. The fight is totally anonymous, so it doesn’t turn into a popularity contest, and everything is kept PG, so it’s even okay for your kids to look at.

ANYway, the fourth tournament is now going on: this time it’s a 3-on-3 team tournament. I can’t tell you which team our staff member is on; heck, I don’t even want to tell you which staff member, just in case. But regardless, go check it out. You can even vote for your favorite team, but I’m pretty sure you have to have a valid Blogger profile, and your profile has to link to a valid blog or sweet website, to keep cheaters at bay. All those voting rules are on there, if you scroll down a little. But even if you don’t vote, it’s just a cool thing to look at! Enjoy!

The following is the holiday shipping schedule from Diamond, as well as our store hours surrounding these major holidays:

The week following Thanksgiving, books will ship on Thursday, November 29.
Our store will be closed on Thanksgiving Day.

The week of Christmas, books will ship two days late, on Friday, December 28.
Our store will close as early as 6pm on Monday, December 24, depending on business. We will be closed on Christmas Day (Dec. 25).

The week of New Year’s Day, books will ship two days late, on Friday, January 4, 2008.
We will most likely close early on New Year’s Eve, and possibly on New Year’s Day. We will announce that schedule near the end of December.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find!

I know I mentioned it in my long-winded con report below, but I thought I’d put a dedicated posting up, just for archiving purposes. So: hey, check out these rad photos I took of the three of us and our friend Steve Saffel tearing it up in Baltimore! Wooo!

Hooray!! Our buddies Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick have produced their most awesome collaboration to date, in the person of young master Henry Leo DeFraction! The proud parents demonstrate their utter lack of respect for traditional naming conventions, true to form. We applaud! Congratulations to Matt and Kelly Sue: let us all hoist a glass at our very next opportunity.

Photo by (I believe) Laurenn McCubbin, which I swiped from Warren Ellis’ site, which I was directed to by Tom Spurgeon. And correction of my grossly erroneous posting of young DeFraction’s real name courtesy of K. Thor Jensen: his new son’s name is Henry Jared Llewoh Jensen. It takes a village. Congratulations to the many people involved with all of these babies!

Whew! I’ll try to be brief, as I’ve written exhaustive descriptions for all the photos I just uploaded to our Flickr page. So we’ll do it chronologically. Ready? Okay? Let’s go!

So Heroes’ owner Shelton Drum, Operations Manager Todd Harlan, and me (I’m Dustin) piled in an overstuffed rental van last Friday and left two hours late for Baltimore, Maryland, and the 2007 Baltimore Comicon. Shelton’s good buddies with show’s organizer Marc Nathan; and while I’m usually suspicious, I have to say that he’s a pretty cool dude. It’s a good sign when no one’s saying anything bad about somebody, and pretty much everybody likes Marc. Uh-oh, this isn’t a good start, brevity-wise. Let me make it up to you: I’ll skip any description of the drive up there, except 1) being 6’2″ and riding in the back seat of a rental van sucks, and 2) we made great time.

Once in the city, we met our buddy Steve Saffel at the hotel and got some dinner. Steve’s worked for about everybody inside and outside the comics biz, and is a straight-up class act from day one. Frankly, Shelton doesn’t deserve friends that good. Steve has a new snazzy Spider-Man coffee table book out, and throughout the weekend missed no opportunity to whip it out to show people: you never saw such a proud papa. My friend Randy Howell, a Baltimore local, met us at dinner, and he and Todd and I ditched the older guys (“That drive really took it out of me”) and met up with some of our comics friends for some drinks and good times. Here, for brevity’s sake, and to resist the urge to constantly name drop, I will skip all description of that evening.

Boy, what a night! Waking up the next morning was a trial, but we did it, and somehow had our booth set up and ready for action by the time the show opened at 10. And did it ever open! I have to assume that Marc Nathan set an attendance record this year, as the floor filled up pretty quickly and we started selling comics hand over fist right away. Once things had leveled off a little bit, I started cruising the floor: my reason for being there was to line up more awesome guests for HeroesCon 07. It takes me a while to conquer my powerful aversion to meeting strangers, which is something of a handicap in this business–after some false starts, I finally started talking to pro’s, the list of which is far too long to mention here. Although I will say it was nice to see the guys from Gaijin and quasi-Gaijin–Cully, Brian, Karl, Phil Noto, Tony Shasteen, Doug Wagner. Plus old friends of the show like Ron Garney, Howard Chaykin, and Michael Golden. Ron Garney, by the way, is a cool dude if you ever get the chance to meet him.

One of the high/low points was standing in different lines in order to meet creators, in order to then invite them to be guests at our show. The worst was Howard Chaykin–we already know him, but I wouldn’t feel right about bustin in his line to say hello, so I respectfully (foolishly) stood in his line for 15 minutes, until I noticed he was regaling the same two guys with stories, and that the line hadn’t moved an inch in all that time. So I switched over to Mike Mignola‘s line, which was moving briskly. Within ten minutes I was right up front and stuttering out my invitation. The problem is that I’m a huge fan of Mike Mignola, and hate to meet him, only to immediately pitch him on something. I guess it’s better than if I were handing him a script or something, but I’d rather talk about how awesome he was. Of course, we sure would love to have him back in Charlotte (he was last here in ’94). When I told Todd I’d invited him he nearly wet his pants, he got so excited. What a nerd.

So let’s skip ahead: because Paul Pope is a super-nice guy, he invited me to come along as his guest to the Harvey Awards. Beforehand the two of us and Jimmy Aquino, co-host of the popular Comic News Insider podcast, had a crab dinner, which was both tasty and expensive. Mid-meal the phone rang, and I took my crabby fingers and shirt-front outside to confer with Nick Gurewitch of the PBF on our Harvey award acceptance scheme (see the Flickr page for the complete rundown, with even more name-dropping). Once our dinner and bottle of wine were finished, we tottered over to the Harvey’s, where we were seated at maybe the coolest table in the place: it was me, Chris Pitzer, Paul, Dean Haspiel and his girlfriend Laura, James Jean, and a guy named (I’m mispelling it) Henrik (I’m probably mispronouncing it, too), who was totally cool.

I’ve heard a lot of negative things from people about the Eisner’s ceremony: not that it’s bad, just that it’s soul-crushingly long. The Harvey’s were actually refreshingly short, with a lot of cool stuff–Sergio Aragones was the keynote speaker, Kyle Baker was the emcee, so there was a lot of joke-cracking. James Jean was one of the presenters, and when he got up to present he told a story about going to Adam Kubert‘s house as a teenager and drawing Wolverine and practicing ribcages and stuff. I can’t remember all of it–that was some good wine we had at dinner. Joe Kubert accepted an award from the Hero Initiative for his work on their behalf–the man who presented the award made a super-long speech about Joe and the Hero Initiative, and then Joe got up and said, “Well, thanks” and sat back down, which made everyone laugh. One of the funniest presenters was Erik Larsen, who made a joke about Superboy and blonde hair which cracked everyone up–except me (I think it was a comic book reference I missed; or wine). He was presenting the award for Best Single Issue or Story, which eyebrow-raisingly went to Civil War #1 which came out like ten years ago, and beat Fun Home, Pride of Baghdad, Mom’s Cancer, and Ganges #1, among others. Surprise! I think you can find a complete list of the Harvey winners here.

After the Harvey’s it was off to the hotel bar, where there was a lot of chitchat, some really expensive drinks, and some good ole networking. I had a good conversation with James Jean about Charles Mingus, but we were interrupted by something, and then James escaped my clutches and there was no one to talk jazz with. The hotel was packed with pro’s–I got to talk to Jim Starlin for a little bit, as well as Nick Barrucci of Dynamic Forces, Tony Shasteen and Tom Feister. I’d planned to go the Mike Wieringo tribute that was held at Edgar’s, but almost immediately after the Harvey’s someone told me they’d gone and that no one was there–the implication being that it had moved, or maybe had always been planned in another bar. Not true! As Shelton told me later, it was at Edgar’s after all, but there was some confusion about what part of the bar. So I missed it, but luckily Todd and Shelton and Steve made it over there, and they said they had a great time. People had gathered to celebrate Mike’s life and enjoy each other’s company, which as someone said, was “exactly what Mike would have wanted.” Anyone who ever met Ringo could tell you that the last thing he’d want was for anyone to be inconvenienced on his behalf–so a good ole party was a great way to remember him.

Speaking of Ringo, I have to mention the many, many pro’s that donated sketches or autographs in his name. I’m not sure what the total might have been, but it seemed like every five minutes they were announcing a different creator signing or sketching to benefit the ASPCA (one of Mike’s favorite charities) or Hero Initiative. The only problem was that the announcements were kind of loud, and the guy doing them had this stentorian deep voice, so it was like God was talking all the time. Oh, that God! Anyway, Sunday was the last day of the show, and I spent much of it meeting everyone else in the convention center, and regretting the second of two hotdogs I had for lunch. I heard a LOT of praise for HeroesCon, both from people who’ve been (“You can consider me confirmed for LIFE” I heard a lot) and who haven’t (“I’ve been hearing about how great your show was for years”), which of course felt great. Between myself and Shelton, we made a ton of confirmations, which I’ll be announcing over the next couple of weeks a few at a time, as we get back into the swing of things.

That night, after loading out our booth and packing the van up, Shelton, Todd, Steve and I (I’m Dustin) went to the Geppi Entertainment Museum for a reception. I was thinking it would just be kinda so-so–Oh, Look! A Lot Of Comics Stuff!–but I was blown away by how cool it was. If you’re in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for any reason, and like comics even a little, you have got to stop in this place. Todd and I were totally geeking out over all the strip art: while I was looking at a Milton Caniff Terry & the Pirates, Todd would point out a Winsor McCay original, then an E.C. Segar. We were bouncing from wall to wall like the kids in Willy Wonka. Everything was really classy, too. Top of the line all the way: lots of dark wood grain, exposed brick, and everything super shiny and clean.

Almost finished! After turning in for an actual complete night of sleep, we got up Monday morning ready to go to the Diamond Retailer Summit. Unfortunately, we got mesmerized watching Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie” and almost missed breakfast. But not even surly caterers could keep up from free food, and we wolfed down our breakfast and then attended a couple of workshops. After lunch Todd and I repaired to the harbor to see that big ole boat, the USS Constellation, but only had about a half-hour before the last presentation we wanted to see. Once that was done, we were out, baby! Literally moments after it ended, we were on the freeway–remember how easy it is to get to the highway from the convention center?–and on the way home. Many thanks to the Baltimore Comicon, in many ways our “sister” show. Marc Nathan, his fiance Shelly, and their staff really put on a great, friendly show, and we were pleased as punch to be part of it. Thanks to everyone who was nice to us in Baltimore. And to the haters: well, you know what they get.

Attention:

As Operations Manager it is my duty to inform you that, due the Labor Day Holiday on Monday the 3rd, new comics will not arrive in our store until Thursday, September 6th. Which is also Dustin’s birthday.

That is all.