Girls With Comics

I was in Hampton, VA this weekend to visit my boyfriend, and he took me to the comic book store. It was actually a decent sized store, but I discovered it wasn’t actually a “comic book store,” but more of a “geekery store.” And that was cool. But it was called “Comic Store,” and the comic selection? Pretty meek.

About 3/8 of the store was comics. Most of that was moderns, but the center glassed in areas were older collector’s comics. There were no slabs, and a lot of collector’s pieces (models, etc.) A quarter of the store was Star Trek/Wars & related paraphanalia, a quarter was D&D and miniature war games stuff, and another quarter was something I wasn’t interested in so I don’t even remember.

The store was poorly lit in REALLY yellow lighting. The longboxes were packed so tightly you needed to fight to get anywhere in the box, risking bending and ruining the comics. There was so much going on, it was hard to focus on ANYTHING. The woman who was available to talk to hardly spoke English, and when she finally figured out my question, had to go ask somebody else for the answer. In their single case of “NEW RELEASES” comics, the comic I was looking for was, in fact, the previously released book. The organization of books was ridiculous, and their graphic novels were two books behind. It was a bigger store than some I’ve seen, but the cons here outweighed the pros.

I was really excited to go in and when I saw it was that big and the ceiling was so high, I was happy to think I might have a positive shopping experience. Unfortunately, this was not the case. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find some things that have been on my list.

I picked up Harley Quinn books #13, 16, 21, 27 and 37. Progress, yay! But still, the fact that the whole place was so disorganized and difficult to navigate, I probably walked around in circles five or so times before I actually found anything. The yellow lights made judging the condition of the comics pretty difficult, and I would never even THINK of buying a high dollar book there because it’s just impossible to see the book for what it really is. I’m glad I was just looking for readers…but I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.

~Han

Tags: Han

This entry was posted on January 3, 2010 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Comic collecting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.