Friday, April 07, 2006

Old Home Week

Ward Batty--longtime friend, former Dr. No's co-owner, and my partner in Comic Shop News-- came by the store on Tuesday; he wanted to bring his son Bill to do some shopping. Bill is in an Aliens & Predator frame of mind right now, and we had a variety of things that caught his attention; it's particularly good for Bill, though, that he is one of the few eleven-year-old boys on earth whose dad doesn't say stuff like, "why are you wasting your money on that junk?"

As I'd mentioned, Brett is also back this week, so he was there, as was Tom Kater, who was helping us process books; a few minutes after Ward arrived, good guy and all-around great artist Mark Bagley, a friend for a quarter century now, also stopped by. It felt sort of like a Cheers moment, with everyone in the store a regular who'd been coming in for at least a decade. Mark signed a few books for Bill, who just happened to be adding a half-dozen or so issues of Mark's Ultimate Spider-Man to his stack when Mark pulled up in front of the store. It was a pleasant break in a hectic Tuesday afternoon for me, and I hope it's one of those days that sticks out in Bill's mind for years to come--he had just started asking about a comic he liked, and the artist drove up, walked in the door, was introduced, and personalized some comics for him. I know if that had happened to me when I was eleven, I'd have still been telling everyone about it when I was fifteen...

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