Monday, August 08, 2011

Neon News

Yesterday I got a Facebook friend invite from John Crowe, who used to be a customer at Dr. No's back in the 1980s. Turns out that John is now living in the San Francisco area, where he is one of the principals in a comics and popular culture store, Neon Monster. John reminded me that when he was a kid, he would ride his bicycle to our store almost every day in the summer, looking through the comics and picking up something new and exciting to read.

I never really expected that a former customer would end up opening his own comic shop on the other side of the country. John thanked me for being his "gateway," and it made me feel good that someone enjoyed the Dr. No's experience so much that he decided to become a comics retailer.

(Interestingly, Geoff Johns credited Comic Shop News as being one of the main factors in his professional writing career: Geoff send us a spec piece, an interview with Jerry Ordway that we ran in Comic Shop News. When he got the check, Geoff said that he decided he liked this idea of getting money for putting words on paper. As you've probably noticed if you've followed DC for the past few years, Geoff became very, very good at putting words on paper... and he has, I suspect, earned a lot of money for himself and for DC!)

We never really know how our everyday actions might influence others...

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