Subconscious of Doom

I had a dream last week that this week was Thanksgiving, so comics came out on Tuesday. Doom DeLuise and I decided to go to a different comic shop on this particular week, which happened to be the week that Batman #681 came out — the conclusion to Batman R.I.P.

This shop reminded me a lot of the inside of a Starbucks — lots of wood covering the floors and the walls, lots of brushed steel hardware. The comic shelves were built-in wood shelves with recessed lighting along the sides. Very nice store.

So anyway, DC had decided to take advantage of the anticipation building around the Batman R.I.P. finale and exploited it for extra money and exposure. There were several variations of Batman #681 — each was $4.99 and included a full extra issue of some unpopular DC comic. So you’d get two comics for the price of one and two thirds comics, except you only wanted half of it and you weren’t likely to read “Galactic Champions” or whatever stupid issue was stuck in the second half.

Still, I picked one up and was careful to not peek inside. Once that was out of the way, I moved on to trying to find the rest of my comics for that week, but I quickly discovered that they were all shuffled up. You might see one comic on the front of a stack only to have a completely different comic buried inside. It made comic hunting really frustrating.

It was about this time that Doom DeLuise and I noticed two super hot girls shopping for comics. Beautiful people like this, male or female, did not normally shop at comic stores, so they were impossible to miss. DeLuise bailed on the shopping and went to check out when they did, so as to put on the finest smoothtalk a comic shop has ever seen. I kept trying to find whatever other comics I was going to buy.

This went on for a long time, to the point where DeLuise was waiting at the register for me to finish so we could get out of there. I knew there were several comics coming out that week that I wanted to buy, but other than this stupid version of Batman #681, I couldn’t find any of them in this mess. I overheard one of the customers saying Mice Templar #7 came out this week, so I asked her if she could help me find it. I grabbed it and decided to give up on the rest of the new comics, going instead to the back issues to fill in some Mice Templar gaps.

I got to the back issue section to find that L-N was missing. I went to the register to check out and asked the clerk if he had Mice Templar #6, because I only had up through #5 and now I was buying #7. He told me he’d check in back. When he came back up front, he told me that they did have #6, and that he would gladly sell me the whole set, #1-7. I told him I didn’t need #1-5 because I already had them. He wouldn’t budge. It was #1-7 or nothing. So I went for nothing. DeLuise and I vowed to never return to that store.