March 4th, 2011

Comic lovers! We're back this month to give you the update on all things Local Heroes. Lots of exciting stuff coming up in the next few months - Free Comic Book Day, new Local Heroes t-shirts, hopefully a creator event (which is killing me) and all the awesome comics and graphic novels you've come to expect. Also, don't forget to get on board for the Marvel Comics event of the year - Fear Itself! It looks pretty great, with all our favorite supes finally on the same page to fight the other team.

Things have been moving along here nicely over the last month or so. We just began planning what we hope will be our biggest Free Comic Book Day ever, so mark your calendars for the first Saturday in May, the 6th. We expect you all to be here! This year's line up of books looks particularly awesome, and we'll have even more free comics than ever to supplement the already massive amounts of freeness we usually have. It should be a great day and fun for everyone, so bring a friend or two and turn them on to comic books!

Our first band parody shirt sold out pretty quickly, and is by far the most requested t-shirt. Well fear not, my friends, we have an all new shirt in the works and they should be ready in April. All the same American Apparel goodness you've come to expect, with a design we think is pretty fantastic.

We had hoped to have a creator event for you guys in February or March, but we had some scheduling difficulties and had to start from scratch. Things are looking better for early Summer, and we hope to have an announcement in time for Free Comic Book Day.

We also wanted to mention that we are a drop-off location for the Harry Potter Alliance's book drive, benefiting Our House Families - a great charity. Drop off new or gently used books all month long, and we'll put them to good use.

We read quite a few really good books this month (as always). We did, however, manage to make our top picks for new graphic novels this month: Scenes From an Impending Marriage and Morning Glories.

A lot of you may be familiar with Adrian Tomine and his comic, Optic Nerve. It's one of the best indie comics of the last ten years and has led Tomine to other, more lucrative work with the likes of the New Yorker and bands like Weezer. It's been a while since new Optic Nerve, but in the meantime, he managed to put out this great collection of vignettes surrounding the planning of his wedding. These are great, especially for anyone who has ever been involved in the planning of a wedding. Very different from Optic Nerve, these stories are sweet and laugh-out-loud funny. This is one of those great comics that you want to give to someone who has never read comics before - and only ten bucks to boot!

Morning Glories received a ton of buzz over the last few months as the next big hit from Image Comics, in the vane of Walking Dead or Chew. We sold out of all of the issues so quickly that I never had a chance to read any of it. That was remedied with the newly released first volume, which I devoured. Morning Glories is one of the country's premier prep schools, and it just enrolled six new students who all share some very strange coincidences. They soon bare witness to some seriously effed up stuff going on at their school, and realize after it's too late that they are trapped with no one to help them, but themselves. The book has a bit of a "Lost" feel, with a lot of secrets we've yet to find out answers to. Nick Spencer is definitely the next big thing, already having been snapped up by Marvel comics with an exclusive deal. That won't stop him from doing awesome creator-owned books like this, thankfully, as all the buzz on this book is well-deserved.

Thanks for stopping by, as always, and we hope to see you guys soon!

-LH (Greg)