Does Marvel still have a "house style"?  I don't think you could really say that today.  I mean their comics run the gamut from Skottie Young to David Finch and every tumbler artist style inbetween (unfortunately).

Gem City Comic Con (this July 22-23) is starting to announce and promote it's guests. So far Don Simpson and Michael T. Gilbert are the two I am most excited about, though they were both previous gusts and I have met both before.

-M

Frustrating moment for me in my LCS yesterday.

It’s six miles from me. I went there as I the latest issue of Back Issue is out - but I did not leave with it.

When I got there, people were queuing up outside. A woman opened the door and told us that they’d had an IT issue and that their tills could not take cash or card payments. Okay. It happens. Then she told us the manager had insisted the shop open for browsing purposes only.

Browsing purposes? If you can’t take any cash or card payments, why open at all?

Before I left, I did mention to the woman that I was a regular customer and was coming to pick up an order. Fuel isn’t cheap nowadays, and driving six miles there and six miles back isn’t fun. So she told me to go upstairs and they’d no doubt be able to sort something out for me.

I went upstairs. My Back Issue was on the counter. I’m a regular customer who has a customer order number. The woman appeared to suggest I could take the issue home, but then changed her mind, it would seem. She reiterated the “we can’t take cash or card payments”. What else is there?

I get that IT issues happen (my barbershop has an ancient till, I bet he has no IT issues). But I’ve experienced something similar previously - and that was rectified. Once, I went into WHSmith to buy some books - and their tills were down. The manager sold me the items anyway, and she wrote down the description of items sold/cash taken. She told me that she’d simply put the cash in the till later. On another occasion, the newsagents had an IT issue, but he did the same. He wrote stuff down, put the cash in an envelope and said he’d register the transaction later.

For anyone here who may have worked in a comic store, could my LCS not have done the same? What if I’d given her the money and she’d wrote my customer reference number on an envelope, putting it in the till later?

In a nutshell, I see zero point in opening the shop merely for browsing purposes. As I left, there didn’t appear to be an employee on the door to explain to people it was for browsing only. How many might go in, browse for ten minutes, pick up items and then go to the till? If you can’t take payments of any kind, close the shop. Closed or open, you’re not going to make money either way.

Incidentally, this shop, which doesn’t seem to have much of an emphasis on customer service, has frustrated me and others in the past. Thing is, that’s my nearest comic store. There are Forbidden Planet stores in Wolverhampton and Coventry, both of which I have visited in the past (great service from both!), but they’re far from me. Wolverhampton is 18 miles from my front door. Coventry is 16 miles from here. My options are limited. The local newsagents and WHSmith cannot order in TwoMorrows magazines because they can only order in titles published by a UK publisher. While I have found TwoMorrows books on Amazon, I haven’t been able to find individual magazines.

It’s good to get your perspective, codystarbuck . And, yes, I have experienced both ends of the spectrum and in between.

As confusing as it is, here in the UK, Forbidden Planet and Forbidden Planet International are two separate entities. I went into Forbidden Planet once to see if I could order a graphic novel. I asked the guy on the counter if he had a particular graphic novel, but, after barely looking up, he said something like, “If it ain’t on the shelf, mate, I’d try Waterstones.” Great. No offer to even order it? I made sure people knew that Forbidden Planet International wasn’t the same as Forbidden Planet, which had not offered me good service.

I went into another comic store once to enquire about setting up a book club. My idea was to tie it into the comic store. Customers would pick the graphic novel up from that store, and the store would advertise the book club meet, which would take place at a coffee shop or somewhere (the store had no meeting rooms). The woman on the counter seemed keen. She took my number and said the manager would ring me. I never got a call. I mean, not only would this graphic novel club be a good social occasion for us comic fans, but with the proviso that you’d pick the book up from the store, it’d bring some £££s to the store, too. (The idea was it’d be arranged via the store)

I guess the manager didn’t ring back. Or maybe the store assistant didn’t pass my number on to him. I thought that a book club would be nice, but I also thought it’d be great to set up a Facebook page and give the comic store some free advertising, totally unconditional.

Anyway, from what you describe, it sounds like they could have accommodated me. I was not looking for special treatment. But I do have an order with the store. The guy who happened to be passing anyway, and spotted a Swamp Thing figure in the window, is probably not gonna be too irked if he is told to come back. A customer with a regular order, like me, who has to travel six miles to that shop, expected something a bit more accommodating, I confess.

They could have accommodated everyone.  They chose not to; which I would bear in mind in future dealings.  I could understand if you didn't have power to the store, or had something like flooding, or structural issues that prevented you from opening, period....even staffing issues (these days); but, just because you computer system is down?

At Barnes & Noble, our registers could function in an off-line mode, if we lost the network.  They would store sales information until the network was available again, the upload the sales information to the network.  It would auto-approve credit card transactions up to $50 (since it is covered by insurance).  For larger sales, we would call for authorization, give them the merchant ID number, the card number and the sale total and they would give us an approval code or a denial.  The only issue would be that we couldn't access the B&N Member Card system.  If the customer had their card, we applied the discount.  If they didn't have it with them, we normally took their word for it, unless it was a high dollar item.  If we had no operable registers, we had a "crash kit," with credit card authorization forms, a card imprinter (the old school sliding thing that imprinted the cards info on a carbon), tabulating calculators, and inventory forms to record the ISBNs or UPCs purchased.  We then wrote out receipts, from a generic receipt book and stamped them with a store stamp.  In 20 years, I think we resorted to that once.

Our registers, while in offline mode, could be unplugged and taken to an off-site event, to ring sales.  We used to provide retail books for author events at the local public librabry, so they could be signed.  We'd haul the books and a register unit out there and hook it all up, ring the sales, then return to the store and plug the register back into the network, where it would upload all of the sales.  Once in a great while we got a decline, on a credit card transaction; but, like I said, we were covered for up to $50 in value.

Meanwhile, I have run into that situation at fast food restaurants, where they have no electronic payment back-up and usually just drive off to another restaurant that can take my debit card (I rarely carry cash).  The fact that they have no back-up is on their franchise owner, who was too cheap to pop for something.

Sandman does have a Kirby feel, and is a character name Kirby used before. IIRC