Kids and Comics

Yesterday afternoon, I finished with the last car by three o’clock, so the comic shop opened fifteen minutes after. My opening caught the kids coming home from school, so I had a larger than average crowd looking around. Most don’t have enough for a comic even out of my quarter to fifty cent box let alone the average price of $2.99 for the new comics. I grew up in the fifties, but comics were only ten and twelve cents then. I could buy five or six every week with what I had from cutting yards with that ancient push mower. Now, a kid would have to practically have a full time job to afford buying five or six comics a week.

A boy about nine or ten years old came in and really wanted one of the Ghost Rider books. I explained the story line finished within a six part mini-series, and tried to steer him to some of the self-contained story books, but he was having none of it. He wanted one with the flaming skull, and nothing else would do. I gave him a bunch of the free promotional comics too, so he left happy.

My new manuscript is coming along real well, and I was able to do five pages while I ran the comic shop. It’s a heck of a lot more fun writing them than it is editing the finished script. One of these days maybe Word will come up with a robotic copy editor you can dial into whatever genre of literature you’re writing. If they ever invented it, they’d probably include some Snarky comment if you dial in Pulp Fiction. :)