Just wanted to send a big 'thank you!' to Marvel Comics and my good friend Bill Jemas for helping to increase our sales for the past two quarters.  That's right.  When our customers come into our store looking for their favorite Marvel comics and there aren't any, and when I explain to them that Marvel doesn't believe in their product enough to print a few extra copies for their customers, they ask me if there's anything else I can recommend.  I recommend some of the great DC Comics titles, some CrossGen, a few independents and even a few Marvel titles that they might be overlooking (Black Panther, Daredevil, Alias, just to name a few).
  

We do keep increasing our orders on Marvel titles that warrant it, but we refuse to play Marvel's game of making us bear all the burden and all the risk, and so we keep our Marvel orders pretty close to the bone (cycle-sheeting all the titles tells us what we need anyway).

One thing I've discovered is that most of our customers come in with a certain amount of money they WANT to spend on comics, and if those comics aren't there, they'll buy something else.  And you want to know what they're buying, Jemas?  They're buying mostly DC Comics.  And the beauty of all this is that they're mostly sticking with the DC and other comics they pick up when there's no Marvel to choose from.