I’m off work today due to a general slowness at the office right now, nothing to do so no reason to be there, so I made my weekly trip to my local comics shop (Carol & John’s Comics in Fairview Park, OH) to pick up this weeks new comics.
There’s this great new indy series, Mouse Guard, that I (along with quite a few others, if the buzz is to be believed) have recently started reading. It’s only four issues in, and has grown in readership a lot since the first issue. Thus far I’d only managed to get issue 4 when it came out, and a second printing of the first issue that was released at the same time. No luck on issues 2 & 3, which appears to be pretty common as neither have been reprinted and both had pretty small print runs.
The co-owner of the store (John) was at a convention in Baltimore and the book’s writer/artist, David Petersen, was there and had copies of all the issues for sale. (Apparently he has plenty of copies left, but he’s too small a fish for the main comics distributor to bother with re-orders for.) So John picked up copies of any issues that he knew customers needed to fill out their collections, even though they cost him cover price and left him making absolutely no profit off of. Above and beyond that though, he took the time to have David Petersen autograph the comics, personalized in my case! (Whether or not he did this for everyone, I don’t know.)
If only more business went out of their way to treat customers that well.