Double-Shot Saturday 1 of 2: The Wild Pack

Here, for your reading pleasure, are the two most awesome things that happened to me today:

1: I imagine a lot of comic book stores have customers that have nothing but horrid pornography on their subscriptions, but being as big a store as we are, we've got like six of them. There's the guy with all the pockets, the guy who always says "Hello, Gentlemen" in a cheery voice as he picks up his furry porn even if there's only one of us in the building... and then there's Fleagle and Bingo.

They are not, of course, named after television's Banana Splits, but considering that I'm a spiteful and petty person, it's probably best that I don't use their real names. Anyway.

They're roommates. The sub's in Fleagle's name, which is probably for the best, since I have never personally witnessed Bingo speak so much as a single word. I'm not sure how they became friends, but what they do have in common is a love of Japanese porn comics. Especially the ones where the main characters look twelve.

Especially the ones where the characters are related.

Yeah. Point being? Today, his subscription folder finally collapsed under the weight of his pornography. Medically speaking, That's rad.

2: We're moving the store at the end of the month (a half-mile down the street across from the Ruby Tuesday, please for the love of God stop asking), and since none of us are really keen on moving 300 long boxes of dollar books, we're having a pretty hellacious sale on them.

Right now they're down to a twenty-five cents, and as we've learned from Dave Campbell, people will buy just about anything for a quarter.

Case in point: A woman and her kid come up the counter, the last customers of the night. She's been prowling the dollar stock for a few hours, steadily amassing a huge pile of comics while her son does the same, doing his best to fill up a short box. They finally bring them up at the end of the night, and I start counting the kid's comics. He likes Lobo a lot.

So here's the conversation:

"Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty--... One, two, three, four, five, six--Hey, do you realize you have seven copies of Silver Sable and the Wild Pack #1 in here?"

"Um, it's a #1. And it's... shiny."

This is where my moral dilemma began. I'm not sure if the kid's speculating on the value of Silver Sable's solo debut, but if he was, I wanted to tell him, "Yeah, but you're buying seven of them for a quarter each. Do you really expect the value to spike?"

But then again, if buying seven copies of Silver Sable and the Wild Pack #1 can bring this kid happiness, who am I to stand in the way?

But here's the punchline. When I was going through his mom's stack--which admittedly, I think she was buying to send to the troops in Iraq, God bless her--there was another copy of the same comic.

Final Tally:



Shine on, you crazy diamonds.