Rhode Frog: Favorite Places: Friendly Neighborhood Comics

Comic Book Guy moved to Bellingham!
Well, he's a guy, and he loves comic books. He's also a former lawyer and school committee member. He doesn't have a pony tail or eat pork rinds behind the counter. His name is Ernie Pelletier Jr., owner of Friendly Neighborhood Comics in Bellingham, and he's probably sick of being compared to Comic Book Guy. But I have the feeling that, once his store becomes wildly successful (which I truly believe it will be), Pelletier will have created a new, local comic-book-guy image: super-friendly, intelligent, promotor of literacy, giver of raffle tickets, rescuer of damsels... well, you get the point.

Check out the atmosphere:

It's that bright and shiny and awesome in there. The man has given Watchmen it's own section right at the door - that's my kind of welcome.

Pelletier is usually behind the counter with a smile, or you will see his equally hospitable relatives holding the fort while he's at a con (he advises that boyfrog and I skip San Diego - too celebrity-focused - and wait for New York next year).

FNC has the perfect selection for everyone: a kids section, manga, young adult, new releases, graphic novels, horror on the back wall, magazines, figures and cards, a few non-comic novels. I have my eye on the new, vintage-covered Bond books by Fleming. You've been warned.

Boyfrog gets a teacher's discount during his weekly visit (high school history. His infinite patience with teenagers baffles me). Artist Craig Rousseau was there for a signing a few weeks ago; more will surely follow.

Pelletier will hold a minimum of four new release titles per month if you sign up. He always has a raffle for something (a girl in Woonsocket won a set of tickets to see Watchmen tonight night in Boston. It should've been me!). There's also talk of a pizza place opening on one side of him, and a coffee shop on the other. I asked when I could move it. Dude thought I was kidding.

I admit - I'm new to this fan girl thing. But my whole heart is in it, and that heart resides in Neighborhood Friendly Comics.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Favorite Places: Friendly Neighborhood Comics

No comments:

Rhode Island Links

Massachusetts

Be the Change You Wish To See in the World

News, Politics, Magazines

Words, Books, Thoughts

Geekery, Images

Blog Archive