WALKING DEAD: I'd never heard this before
/Obviously, this story had to have happened... it just had never happened to ME before.
Customer comes to the counter, waving a copy of WALKING DEAD #105. "What the heck is this?!" he exclaims.
"Uh...? What do you mean?" I ask.
"This! What IS this?" He's sort of shaking the comic about, I guess this is the one legitimate time to call it a "floppy".
"I'm not sure exactly what you mean, sir, do you mean 'in relationship to the TV show'?"
"No, no, I know the comic is different from the show; what I mean is what, exactly, is THIS?"
I blink a few time, and am entirely unsure what to say. "It's... it's a comic...?"
"I don't understand," he's getting frustrated, "is this volume 18 or something?"
"Oh!"
"I mean, I have the first seventeen issues, so what is this?"
I get it now. "Yeah! I mean no! I mean, you know that the books are just collections, don't you...?"
"What do you mean?" he demands.
"Each of those volumes you have is a collection of single monthly issues! There's six in each one. Volume 1 is issues #1-6. You're holding issue #105."
"So... this IS volume 18?"
"Well kind of, issue #103 is what comes right after volume 18, this is the middle of what will be that book"
"Wow!" he exclaims, all excited, "I had no idea!"
"Yeah, and, actually, I think it's kind of a better read as a monthly serialization because you get six cliffhangers. In a book, you just breeze through them. Like you remember in vol 16 when [spoilerific content], and you just turned the page, and you knew he was OK? Well, WE had to wait an entire month to find out what was going to happen. It drove us insane!"
"Wow, that sounds great, I totally have to start buying these!"
Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, there had to be a guy who only read TWD in GN form, and never had encountered a monthly comic before. When you say it outloud, it becomes self-evident. I'd just never met a member of the species before. And I was proud to pop his comic book cherry.
God bless us, every one!
-B