Stand Up Comix

The light shining through the hole in my head makes my eyes glow.
Click on my glasses to see better.

The first Saturday in May is Free Comic Book Day, so that was the basis for our plans that day. Carrie wore her Hellboy t-shirt and I wanted to wear my Superman shirt with a Love and Rockets hoodie over it. The hoodie I won at Cover Me, a music blog I visit once in a while. In case you didn't know, Love and Rockets is both a band and a comic book. The band was named after the comic, which annoyed one of the creators of the comic as he wanted to form a band with that name. So you can see how I wanted to show off my geeky knowledge to the crowd. But, in spite of cool weather before and after that Saturday, it was a darn nice day, too warm to wear either a sweatshirt or even multiple layers. Needing to wear long sleeves because of my sensitivity to sun exposure, I just wore the plain blue shirt. I have no long sleeved comics related shirts. But I did wear a small Usagi Yojimbo pin.

Our first stop was J & R Comics and Cards in Brunswick. We discovered them last year when they had a person parading around a more main street with a sandwich board announcing free comics and free food. Their selection of comics is pretty small, but they were such nice people I wanted to try and give them some real business. I bought 2 comics while there, but they didn't have the storage supplies I wanted. I'd held off on buying them, hoping to give J & R the money. They didn't have any free food this year, but did have plenty of free comics.

We met up with one of my coworkers, Sheila, and her husband Fred at the store. I'd gotten Sheila hooked on Carrie McNinch's minicomix and wanted to expose her to some more. Fred turned out to be a long time MAD fan, so I picked him up an issue of Groo. After the shop we went over to Bombay Mahal and had their buffet. Carrie and I think this is the better of the 2 Indian restaurants in Brunswick. The four of us got to chat for a while before heading off on our separate errands.

Next shop to hit was in Topsham. A new gaming and comics shop that we saw a few months ago. At that time they had next to nothing in comics, waiting for the shelves they said. Well, even though they weren't on the Free Comic Book Day website, they were still participating. We went in, saw they had little improvement, and left.

So third and final comics stop was Casablanca Comics in Portland. That's the shop in the above photo. They give out a good selection of free comics, their choice mostly. We usually get our comics here because it is the largest comics shop in the state, even if it seems small compared to the ones we used to go to in Arizona.

We did other things that day, but why talk about them when this was a celebration of Free Comic Book Day after all.