Feel the Love.

It seems like every time I see Linda, she's connected to her Ipad.

"I wonder if that Ipad is enjoying it's human," I said.

**********

After ignoring the Bulletin story for most of a day, KTVZ finally did the most minimal story they could do, and almost immediately dropped it down off their lead headline scroll. Professional courtesy?

**********

Nature seems to have decided that if we can't get a stimulus plan together, it will give us one.

Earthquakes. Hurricanes.

Unless we've descended so far that we won't even fix our national monuments.

Which at this point in history, seems possible. We're just ripe for the rise of the Apes, I think.
Time for a new species.

***********

My UPS guy assured me that The A-Team was a lot of fun.

It was a whole lot of yelling and incomprehensible action scenes. Ugg.

Did enjoy Conan, though it will never match the sheer strangeness of the original stores.

Fright Night was fun, too.

Had a customer assure me that Ted Bell was a great thriller writer.

It was a whole lot of bad dialogue, cardboard characterizations, sloppy plotting. And why do so many thriller writers have to be such right wing lunatics? Worse than Tom Clancy?

Meanwhile, I discover John Burdett's Bangkok novels, which are brilliantly done. Great stuff.

Can't people tell the difference between good movies and books and bad movies and books?

To answer my own question, apparently not.

I've learned in my store to ask what books the customer likes. If they tell me about three authors I don't like, I leave them alone, mutter something like, "Lots of good books in here. It's so hard to know what a person will like!"

If, on the other hand, they tell me about three authors I like, I start telling them about my recent favorites.

Really quite amazing how the readers seem to split into these two camps.

**********

We'll be getting the first of the new DC titles next week. Justice League of America, with Jim Lee art, Geoff Johns writing.

Did I mention I got a ton of new signups for these 52 new #1? I'm hoping for one or two new readers, and maybe a few more returning readers. Not just the same readers reading more books. Because that will probably dissipate.

Execution will be everything with these titles, I think.

***********

The comments after retailer Brian Hibb's latest Tilting at Windmills column, just make me 'feel the love' comic fans have toward their local comic shops.

Not.

Thing is, this really is a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Look, most of us aren't perfect -- we don't make enough money to be perfect. Leaving out personalities and individual differences, that's the biggest roadblock for comic shops. We have to be very lean to survive, or like me, accumulate material over time.

I had a great example yesterday. I guy who comes into the store regularly from out of town was looking for a couple of this week's releases.

One, CHEW, is a comic that has been coming out for a couple of years. I carried the first year and a half of the comic, and when I went over to see what was in stock, I had two copies of the last six months I ordered it for the stands, and one copy of each of the preceding six months.

In other words, I hadn't sold a copy off the stands for six months, and sold a single copy in the six months before that.

The other comic he asked for, The Bionic Man, I didn't even order. I'd had no requests for it. Makes me a bad comic shop? Except that every month's catalog has dozens, hundreds of titles that are iffy sellers. Sure some of them would sell, but most, from experience would not.

If I ordered all of them, I'd be a great comic shop that was losing money. Thing is, if this customer had been a local, I would've immediately reordered them. Instead, he walked away empty handed, probably thinking I was doing a lousy job.

But I'm doing the job the market will allow me.

Anyway, I wish the customer could see that.