What a pleasant surprise it was to wake up this morning to find that Ash Avenue Comics was named Best Comic Book Shop in the Phoenix New Times 2022 Best of Phoenix poll! There are so many amazing comic book shops in the Phoenix area that to be singled out for recognition among them is a high honor. Thanks to all of our families for putting up with our weird hours, our staff for all of their passion and hard work, to the New Times for their kind words, and most of all to our customers both locally at our brick-and-mortar store and online nationwide. We’re fortunate to be able to scratch out a living making sure that the books we love end up in the hands of people who are excited about them as we are. Thanks for helping us make it happen, and we look forward to many more years of serving you.
My goodness! Has it already been a year since Free Comic Book Day 2021? The answer is… no! Free Comic Book Day 2021 was in August 2021, therefore ACTUALLY it’s only been nine months, so how do you like that? That’s the sort of joyless pedantry that keeps me working on this website from a top-secret, undisclosed location with only my friend Bilbo Bag ‘n Board for company, rather than down in the shop where I can alienate people and expose us to one-star Google reviews, ha ha!
Pictured: Bilbo Bag ‘n Board
If you’re the type of person who wants to experience joy unconfined, you’re in luck because tomorrow is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY! As you may know, 364 days of the year, comic book store owners are miserly, penny-pinching misanthropes who count every last bag and board in the shop before they leave at night to make sure none have gone missing. But then, late on the night before Free Comic Book Day, each participating store owner is visited by three specters:
The Ghost of Comic Retail Past, a fellow who is always posed in a crouch with his knees up over his head as an homage to Todd McFarlane’s classic Spider-Man #1 cover
The Ghost of Comic Retail Present, who you only get to see after you’ve made an order for 50 other ghosts
The Ghost of Comic Retail Future, a woman of color bearing an iPad with Marvel Unlimited installed on it
Moved to their depths by this sobering experience, the retailers run through the streets, laughing and whooping merrily, and upon arrival at their shop, start handing out free FCBD-branded comic books to the whole town! Not just to the middle-aged men, but to little girls and college students with septum piercings and all sorts of others! They even discount their own inventory by as much as 50% in some cases! (Bags and boards are still $0.35, though. Those things aren’t cheap.) And then, the day after, a notification from Key Collector that an artist drew Kitty Pryde to look a bit like Billie Eilish in a Marvel house ad will come through, and people are wondering if maybe this means that Billie Eilish will be playing Kitty Pryde in a forthcoming Disney+ series, and then the race is on to pull every single Kitty Pryde cover appearance out of the back-issue bins and flood eBay with them… and the whole cycle begins again.
That is the sacred tradition of our people. And we have honored that tradition every May for twenty years, except during the pandemic and that time it was delayed to August.
If you’ve read this far, you may well be saying to yourself, “That was stupid. I just wanted to know what Ash Avenue Comics is doing for Free Comic Book Day. Tell me. Tell me, damn your eyes.”
Well, we have all kinds of free comics, for a start! There’s the Dark Crisis Special Edition from DC, a 25 Years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Special from Boom, Spider-Man/Venom #1 from Marvel, a lead-in to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Armageddon Game event from IDW, and loads more! Choose up to five titles each, one copy per title per person. Play fair!
Remember that every issue isn’t for every age group. Not all of these titles are for kids! The books are color-coded to indicate the age range they’re aimed at. Here’s a guide for you culture warriors out there:
In addition, everything in the store is 20% off from 10:00-2:00 (excluding new issues, items on hold, and items already discounted). What better time to get that Jim Lee X-Men Artist’s Edition book that’s the size of a tombstone?
“Once, there was a bed here. Now I sleep atop a pile of Mutant X back issues.”
Are you running out of space for your comics? Perhaps you have a lot of comics that you know you’re never going to look at again. Perhaps an organizational expert from a TV series you’ve just watched on a popular streaming service has inspired you to thoughtfully re-examine the things in your life that bring you joy. Perhaps your spouse or partner has given you an ultimatum, and they seem really serious this time.
We have great news! Ash Avenue Comics iswilling to take that mountain of comics off your hands for cash money that you can take home to that spouse or partner and say, “HA! I told you these things were an investment!” That’ll show ’em! Our expert comics buyer will give you an honest appraisal of your collection and offer you a fair deal. What could be sweeter?
Collection appraisals are offered Tuesday through Saturday by appointment only. No walk-ins! Please schedule an appointment with our buyer, and we look forward to seeing your collection!
Thanks to you, Free Comic Book Day 2021 was a resounding success! It was a pleasure to spend the day in the company of old Ash Avenue Comics friends and to have the opportunity to make new ones. We got a special treat when Spider-Man and Spider-Gwen swung by to plug in some gaps in their back issue collections! To live in such a rich, diverse community of comics fans and pros is a gift that we don't take for granted. Thank you for choosing to shop at Ash Avenue Comics, and we hope to see more of you in the year ahead! On to Free Comic Book Day 2022!
And here we are, 2020 is finally coming to a close. It was as strange a year for comics as it was for the rest of the world, but the industry showed its resiliency and managed to survive nine months of a pandemic. Our little shop survived too. I read a lot of comics this year, many from years past, but there was plenty read this year as well, and a lot of what I read were some really good comics. A few of the titles in my best of list really deserve a second (or first) look if you didn’t see them in the shop. One of my favorites was Garth Ennis and PJ Holden’s The Stringbags, a World War II graphic novel that is as good of a comics war story as I have ever read, and really stands up as testament to Ennis’ place as comics’ greatest living war writer. I also want to shout out Alan Moore and Richard Corben for providing me with so many amazing comics from the past that I have either dived into for the first time, or am rediscovering.
While we can’t read everything, here’s what we read and loved that was published in 2020. Happy New Year, see you in 2021!
Drew’s best comics of 2020
Department of Truth (Image)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Cartoonist (Drawn & Quarterly)
The Stringbags (Dead Reckoning)
Strange Adventures (DC)
DCeased (DC)
Pulp (Image)
Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics (Ten Speed Press)
One Million Tiny Fires (Silver Sprocket)
Reckless (Image)
What We Mean by Yesterday (Instagram)
Rorschach (DC)
Sports is Hell (Koyama)
Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books)
Best reprints of the year
Biologic Show (Hollow Press)
Complete Noir: Manchette and Tardi (Fantagraphics)
Yoshiharu Tsuge: The Swamp (Drawn & Quarterly)
Angela’s picks
Aggretsuko (Oni Press)
Eat and Love Yourself (Boom)
Something is Killing the Children (Boom)
Lois Lane (DC)
BL Metamorphosis (Seven Seas Entertainment)
Heartstopper (Scholastic)
Venus in the Blind Spot (Viz)
Sierra’s selections~
Tartarus (Image)
Dying is Easy (IDW)
Crossover (Image)
Scumbag (Image)
TMNT The Last Ronin (IDW)
Mercy (Image)
Locke and Key/Sandman (IDW)
Die!namite (Dynamite)
