Black Friday, Local Comic Shop Day and Small Business Saturday at CNJComics
It’s that time of year again!
If you’re new to the culture of the shop, our Black Friday event is our longest-running event, going on for over 20 years now.
We host this event from 7 pm to midnight on Friday, so our staff can be with their families and you can get any other shopping chores out of the way before hanging out with us. It’s a really fun social event too, and a fun tradition for a lot of our customers. It’s more about enjoying the hobby than a mad consumer battle. It’s our biggest sale of the year too, and one of only two times that we pull all the books out of our backroom and storage locker and make them $1.00 each. (50 cents each for 100 or more!) We’ve got lots of stuff that’s never been picked through before, as we’ve been buying up collections left and right lately. It’s about 75,000 books. They’re in pretty good order too, so get your list together!
Also that night, from 7 pm to midnight:
- 50% off all Back Issues
- 20% off EVERYTHING else in the shop. (yes, everything. This is a first for us.) The most important part of the night, the part that adds the camaraderie, is the raffles!
- We’ll be raffling off 50 hand-picked graphic novels at a rate of five every half hour starting at 7:30 pm. You get a raffle ticket for every $10 you spend and the tickets stay in all night. YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN! Tickets are non-transferable and you can win up to three times. Every half hour we also have one MEGA prize, all of which are pretty spectacular this year. They include stuff like:
An entire set of Scott Snyder Batman Graphic Novel Volumes 1-10
A couple of $200 MARVELS PLATINUM EDITION SLIPCASE HARDCOVERS
A full set of Walking Dead Graphic Novels Volumes 1-32 (!)
More stuff that we won’t even tell you about so there’s still some surprises!
We also end the night at midnight with a raffle for a $100 gift certificate. Lots of people do their shopping, then shuttle back and forth between Red Lantern and Working Class Brewery for drinks between raffles.
We also provide some snacks and non-alcoholic drinks during the night to keep you going!
This is one of my favorite nights of the year, it’s just a really great vibe. Ask around. Even if you hate Black Friday I believe there’s a primal urge that wants to buy something on that day. Let it be on your terms and have some fun. Great night, great people.
Which leads us too…
Small Business Saturday!
The day after Black Friday is Small Business Saturday and a much more mellow way to browse through the $1.00 bins. We’ve found a growing culture of people who want to shop local on that day. All weekend long (including during the day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday) we offer:
- 50% off back issues
- 10% off everything else in the shop
As stated above, we keep the $1.00 books out all weekend, so you can really start browsing them on Friday at noon.
I always make sure I pop out of the store to do a little local shopping of my own. (Paisley Monkey in Lakewood is a favorite.)
If you stop anywhere that weekend snap a photo and tag it with #smallbizsat #shopsmall and #cnjcomics. A big part of the day is not just shopping but raising awareness of some of your favorite local shops. Teamwork makes the dream work!
Shop Small and Feed the Cat!
Back up for a moment! Before that whole weekend, we’ve got Local Comic Shop Day on Saturday, November 23rd. Local Comic Shop Day is in the spirit of Small Business Saturday and is a day to draw attention to the fact that Local Comic Shops are still out there.
The day has a list of exclusive items available that you can only get in an independently owned brick and mortar shop. We’ll be carrying just about everything, (which you can check out here at the Local Comic Shop Day website) but some of the items are so ridiculously allocated that they’ll only make a couple of people happy. We’d like to focus on two items that we believe are the highlights of the day. (and that we are getting lots of!)
The first is Brain K Vaughan’s (Saga) Walking Dead story “The Alien” in print for the first time ever!
This is the only in-continuity Walking Dead story that Robert Kirkman has not written and it’s a great stand-alone tale about what happened to Rick’s younger brother Jeffrey in Spain, which was briefly mentioned all the way back in issue #3.
It’s a subtle story that would be a great purchase to celebrate how Walking Dead started out in local comic shops like ours and grew into what it was after that. The fact that Brian K Vaughan is a native Clevelander just makes it all the better. $5.99
The other book is for fans of Umbrella Academy on Netflix, and it’s the Hazel and Cha Cha Save Christmas one-shot.
The two assassins track down a plot to discredit Christmas! $4.99
As a special thank you for shopping local during these events, we’ve reprinted some of our most popular prints, featuring art by local artists. These prints will be free with any purchase on November 23rd, 29th, 30th and December 1st. You can take all four!
They include Ladies Night by Erin Caruso:
Superman Americana by Erin Caruso:
Stan Lee “I had so many more stories to tell” by Jeff Ritchie
We’ll also have copies of our map to Superman’s History in Cleveland, which was made exclusively for the shop.
What better way to celebrate the local comic shop then to give you something you can only get here.
Thank you in advance for your decision to shop local this season, even if it’s not with us!
