Saturday, October 18, 2008

a comic book for everyone?

I just had one of the strangest calls I'd ever gotten here at my store. This woman calls from the Venetian, a hotel here in Las Vegas, calling for directions to my store (that's not the strange part). Then she says she's looking for a manga (actually she asked for an anime and I had to explain that anime was Japanese for animation and manga was Japanese for comics just to make sure she wasn't looking for a dvd) for her son who's very anti gun control (her description of her son) that specifically has characters who are anti gun control. I told her that there are many manga series that feature characters using guns, but none come to mind in which the characters take a postion on the use of the guns. She said thank you to me for my info, but I don't think I satisfied her need (her son's need) for a manga series that takes an anti gun position and I'd be really surprised if she comes to my store. I'm mostly of the opinion that there's a comic or manga (same thing of course) for whatever genre or topic a person likes to read, but this call has shown me otherwise - unless anyone reading this can point me in the direction (name of a title) of such a comic / manga.

Before this call the strangest call I'd gotten here at the store was someone calling asking about real estate. The name of my store is Alternate REALITY Comics, but this person who called asking about real estate read the name of my store as Alternate REALTY (and over the years I've actually had a handful of people make such a call and I know that they weren't prank calls)!? The reply I want to make to people who have called me about this is "Yes, I've got some great real estate for really cheap in this alternate dimension slightly to the left of ours", but I just tell them that they've called Alternate REALITY Comics and I just sell comic books. I do wonder though how these people have stumbled on my store name and then thought to make an inquiry about real estate when the word "Comics" follows "Alternate Reality or Alternate REALTY as they've read it." Oh well, back to my monthly order - maybe I should look into buying some real estate in another reality and or create a comic featuring characters foaming at the mouth about their opposition to gun control!

Edited two hours later: So the woman who called me earlier did come in and she was just determined to bring her 25 year old son back a "little thinking of you" book, so I directed her to a manga called Gunsmith Cats, a manga by Kenichi Bonoca about two American gals (they're called girls on the back cover) who own a gun store and are explosives experts who also do some kind of bounty hunter work. I've heard that Bonoca, the creator of Gunsmith Cats, is a gun enthusiast and makes sure he gets all the details right, so I like to think I found the closest manga that her son would like based on her description of what he likes. Now that I think about it, another long running manga, Golgo 13, about the world's greatest assassin, would probably have worked also. And it turns out that this woman was really nice, she just would have had an easier time of finding something for him if she knew the titles of some of the mangas or animes that her son has liked. Whew - now to get to the Marvel part of my ordering for the month of December (Marvel has WAY TOO MANY TITLES coming out in December)!

1 comment:

Derrick said...

Hi Ralph

Gunslinger Girls might have worked also.

Derrick