I haven't been following my RSS feeds lately, primarily because I've been spending a lot of time concentrating on gaming podcasts. So I missed
Wil Wheaton's posting about his latest
Geek in Review article until Jessika emailed it to me. In it, he lays out all the reasons we need to support our "Friendly Locals," as he calls them, the comic shops, the gaming stores, the music stores, before they are gone.He's absolutely right. When I first started reading
Hellblazer, I was picking up the trade paperbacks at Borders, because they had most of the early ones and I could get discounts there. Then Dustin, quite rightly, read me the riot act for not going to a local comics shop to get them. I immediately started frequenting
Atomik Pop, the same shop he goes to, despite it's distance from the house. And the experience was as different as Wil's was in his article. The first time I was in, they didn't have either of the trades I was looking for, but the shopkeeper came back where I was standing in front of the racks in deep speculation. He offered to help me find what I was after, and when he saw they weren't there, immediately offered to first call their store in Norman to see if they had them, and if not, go ahead and order them for me. By the time I'd left, I knew both would be waiting for me by the following weekend, and knew I was in the right place.
Technorati Tags: 
