Better Late Than Never

Yes, I know it seems like the posts on here are getting fewer and farther between. And yes, I could use the excuse that the FanExpo takes a lot out of me each year and my subsequent illness(just a bad cold, but I seem to take longer to recover each year), slowed me down quite a bit. The truth is I'm more of a face-to-face kind of guy, and sitting down "talking" to the computer keypad still feels a little awkward to me sometimes.
Anyway heres a round-up of what should have been several posts over the last 3 weeks.

The Fan Expo went great, saw a lot of new faces and a lot of friendly familair people too. I didn't get much of a chance to walk around it was so busy. I did make one pass through artist alley in hopes to see one of my favourite authors,Peter David, but all that I saw at the table behind his nametag was an empty bag of Doritos. I'm actually kind of surprised some fanboy didn't scoop it up to sell on E-Bay.
Despite better than expected business at the show, there was still a lot of stuff brought back to the store. The long table at the back of the store has about 8 boxes of buck books(70 cents each when you buy 10 or more). Currently they contain titles beginning with A thru G or so. The plan is to rotate thru these every few weeks so that you'll get to see "fresh" stock fairly often. I have some staff here (mostly Kellie and Soairse) working on another large collection I bought over a year ago, and hopefully they'll get mixed into the batch shortly. Many of these are good runs of late 70's early 80's stuff you don't normally see for a buck.
The table at the front of the bins is still covered in some great bargain paperbacks ( with even more added to the two comic bins directly behind the table). Some are overstock sale
items purchased especially to give you guys a deal, others are slow sellers recently culled from the paperbacks shelves, to make way for more of the new books that are arriving every week.
I swear, some weeks there seem to be more new paperback and hardcover collections released than regular pamphlet sized comics.
Speaking of swearing, Yes, I did receive copies of the most blogged about comic of the year(so far), All-Star Batman and Robin #10. The request of Diamond and DC was that retailers were to destroy the copies originally printed with the curse words somewhat visible. Its pretty obvious from the traffic on E-Bay that many stores did not do so, and admittedly, neither did I. I have however been waiting on them to see how other stores would handle the mess.

My solution is that when the newly printed copies arrive on Sept.24th, customers with a standing order for the title will recieve both copies (the "error" version and corrected version) in their pull( paying only for the one). Any remaining copies will be held back for a month until the fervor dies down, at which point I'll do some kind of draw for them. If anyone still thinks they need to see what the big deal was about ( or thinks this thing has any kind of collectible value) , check this site for info on when the draw will take place. Most likely it'll be part of the 21st annual customer appreciation event in mid-November.

Thats about it for now, except to mention that Comics & More is on Facebook too. It gets updated about as infrequently as this page does. Join the group and add your thoughts on the store, or share stories of past events and conventions you've attended. I'm planning on some kind of informal contest thing where each month a random "friend" of Comics & More will get some kind of prize. This could be a good way for me to move some of these variant comics that have started clogging up the back wall.

NEW COMICS WEDNESDAY

Yes, its another Wednesday when we will be getting our new comics a day earlier than the Americans.
Here's some of what we'll be reading, while they wait till Thursday.

Buffy and Fray battle an old enemy in the future, while Dawn horses around.
Also, the 5th volume of the Buffy Omnibus arrives .This one begins immediately after Season Three, after Sunnydale High has gone up in flames. Buffy is plagued by dreams of fellow Slayer Faith, who now lies in a comma. Jane Espenson, the celebrated writer from the Buffy TV show, writes the powerful Faith story Haunted. And as summer comes to an end, Buffy and Willow begin their first year of college in The Blood of Carthage, in a story written by acclaimed Buffy novelist Christopher Golden. Meanwhile Buffy embarks on a new romance with Riley Finn, and Willow and Oz's relationship comes to an end in Golden's Oz: Into the Wild. This volume also features work by Buffy Season Eight contributors Cliff Richards and Paul Lee and Brian Horton. * Collects Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Haunted, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Blood of Carthage, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Autumnal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Oz "Into the Wild," DHP 2000: Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Take Back the Night," DHP #150: Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Killing Time" ,352 pages,

Fable #75 finally arrives, a few weeks late, but worth the wait. This is the big wrap-up to the war of Fablelands storyline, and had many people worried it was the end of the series as well.
Its a double -sized issue that promises that nothing will ever be the same after this, and someone dies. Well when dealing with comics, death is never permanent, and even less so when talking about Fables.

Marvel starts its goofiest project yet, as Marvel Apes #1 ships. I'm not even sure how they came up with this one, monkeys have always been more of a D.C. thing. There must be at least a dozen regular simian characters running around the D.C. universe. Marvel has to take us to an alternate "monkey" universe to make this work. Still it looks like it could be fun, and is at least a stand-alone mini-series, despite the impression all the monkey variant covers shipping lately, might give you.