Dragon's Breath
Returns!
Hello again, comic and game fans!
It's been a while since our last
issue of Dragon's Breath — a full five months, in which
there have been major changes at H&D. We'll get to all of
them over the course of this newsletter (including the gossipy
stuff), but first let's take care of business with these quick
announcements:
Memorial Day
Delays
& Store Hour Adjustments
New Comics will be one day late this week,
arriving on THURSDAY, MAY 29 because of the Memorial Day
holiday.
Because Wednesday, May 28, isn't a New Comics Day,
we'll be closing at our regular time of 7:00pm instead of keeping
extended hours. We will be open for our
regular New Comics Day extended hours (11:00am to 9:00pm) on
Thursday instead.
For a complete list of what we're expecting, visit
New
This Week at heroesanddragons.com.
H&D
Comics Club:
Golden Age Graphic Novels Are Here
One of our exciting new programs is
the Heroes
and Dragons Comic Club (HDCC).
HDCC is a great opportunity for you
to read new or classic graphic novels and get together with other
people to discuss them. Like any "Book of the Month"
club, we require you to read one graphic novel per month and come
prepared to talk about it. There's a $20 annual membership
fee, but we'll offset the expense by giving you 20% off ALL graphic
novels and trade paperbacks you purchase at the Dragon!
Just flash your membership card when you make purchases.
In our first meeting, we talked about
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In our second meeting,
we'll be discussing The
Golden Age, by James Robinson and Paul Smith.
Golden Age graphic novels are
now in-stock and waiting for you at the front counter of Heroes and
Dragons. Just tell our counter staff that you need a copy of The
Golden Age for Comics Club.
Our next meeting is Thursday, June
5 at 7:30pm. If you're interested in comics, be there.
To learn more, visit Comics
Club > About the Club at heroesanddragons.com.
Classic
Comics Inventory in the Online Store
The Online
Store is back!
Even during its long renovation, when
there was nothing for sale, the Online
Store averaged 100 visitors per week. Now we've put
together a brand-new inventory especially for the web, and we're
inviting you to check it out.
We've scaled back from the last
version of the Online Store, listing only a few hundred items this
time around. There will be more as we grow our inventory, but
we're more comfortable starting with a small, manageable stock
that's targeted to our customers.
The Store is divided into four
sections:
Golden
Age | Silver
Age | Bronze
Age | Non-Comics
Items
... with a quick-and-easy order
form for your convenience. (Nothing fancy, just a simple
web form that will allow us to contact you once we've processed your
order.)
You'll find all this under the Buy
& Sell menu at heroesanddragons.com. We expect updates
every other week throughout the summer.
June
2003 Previews Files Now Available
June 2003 Previews files are
now available in the Subscriptions
section of heroesanddragons.com.
The print version of Previews
catalog will be available for sale this Thursday at Heroes and
Dragons. This month's orders are due Saturday, June 14.
Personnel
Department:
"Hey, Everybody O.K.?"
Before X-Statix made him a
superstar of the new millennium, Pete Milligan wrote a charmingly
off-kilter super-hero strip called Paradax! When
Paradax came bursting through a wall or broke up a bank robbery he'd
ask, "Hey, everybody O.K.?" It became his unlikely
battle cry.
It's a question we get a lot these
days, in various forms: What's will all
the changes? What happened to Scott and Tracy? Is there
ever going to be another issue of Dragon's Breath?
Here, in one place, are all the answers!
We began a revamp of
heroesanddragons.com back in February, but the economic slowdown
forced us to reconsider our plans for this business year.
Faced with uncertain market forces,
Chris decided to play it safe and cut costs at the Dragon, bringing
us back to a leaner, more-responsive business model. This
meant cuts in our enormous labor budget — a move that left Scott
and Tracy looking for new jobs.
"Uncertain" can mean a lot
of things, however. By the time Tracy and I were officially
looking for work, we'd both been contracted to work part-time for
the Dragon. Tracy's spending a few hours a week in the store,
helping out with merchandising and office work, while I'm managing
heroesanddragons.com as an independent contractor.
Neither of us are full-time Dragon
employees, but we're both continuing our involvement with the
store. If Paradax stuck his head around the corner, I'd give
an enthusiastic thumbs-up and say, "Yep, everybody's
cool! When are you gonna show up in X-Statix?"
* * * * * * * * * *
Anyone who needs a good webmaster (or
a list of Paradax appearances) should contact
Scott immediately. I'm still looking for full-time work
and will happily send you a link to my online résumé.
* * * * * * * * * *
On an unrelated note, we'd like to
bid a fond farewell to Josh Gehling, who graduates from high
school this spring and is now moving on to bigger and better
things. We're proud to have been Josh's first "real"
job, and we wish him all the best in the future.
What's the
(New) Deal with Dragon's Breath?
Our popular e-mail newsletter is back
— in a big way!
Welcome to Dragon's Breath Volume
8, issue # 1 ("issue # 8.1" as we number 'em). This
electronic issue marks the start of a new direction for our
newsletter — and the beginning of our tenth year of publishing Dragon's
Breath.
The very first edition of our
newsletter was handed out in the old North store in May of
1994! A lot has changed since then. For one thing,
there's no more paper newsletter. We've used e-mail to reach
our customers for the past five years, and we're still amazed by how
far-reaching our mailing list has become.
As part of our 10th anniversary
celebration, we're switching Dragon's Breath to an HTML-rich
format. This allows us to send links, colors, and images to
you via e-mail.
We've used HTML-rich e-mails before
— in Volume 6 of Dragon's Breath — but there's a big
difference in sending individual e-mails to a few dozen people and
developing a multi-platform newsletter that will work for AOL,
Hotmail, Yahoo!, Lycos, EarthLink, RoadRunner, BellSouth, and a
dozen other ISPs. We're feeling bold this year, so we're
giving HTML e-mails another shot.
Not only are we adding quality to the
newsletter — we're adding quantity, too! Effective
immediately, Dragon's Breath will be coming to you once a
week — look for it in your inbox on Monday mornings.
(This issue is running a little late
due to problems with the new format.)
Question
of the Week: "New This Week"
New
This Week is a perennial favorite of our visitors. During
the site renovation, we tried to keep New
This Week up to date, lapsing for only a couple of weeks during
the final phases of the change.
With Dragon's Breath moving to
a weekly schedule, here's our question to you:
Do you want to see the New
This Week list
right here in the Dragon's Breath newsletter,
or do you prefer to visit the list on the web site?
ALSO:
Do you want to see the return of cover
images to the New
This Week list?
Visit this page
to share your opinions with us. We'll post your decision and
comments in a future issue of Dragon's Breath.
Coming
Events
This Saturday (May 31) at noon,
we're having a sealed-deck pre-release tournament for Warhammer
CCG's "Winds of Magic" expansion. Buy a
sealed deck and two boosters and you've got a chance to win great
Warhammer-themed prizes supplied by Games Workshop.
Wizard
World East is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania this
weekend. The convention starts this Friday, May 30 and
ends Sunday, June 1. Look for our booth.
The Lord of the Rings CCG League
meets every Tuesday at 4:00pm. If you're interested in
joining, contact
Ben.
H&D
Comic Club has its monthly meeting next Thursday, May 5
at 7:30pm. Be at the front door at 7:30pm.
In the
News
Marvel Comics released some
tantalizing teaser images relating to Neil
Gaiman's mysterious eight-issue 1602 mini-series.
Amazing Spider-Man will return
to its original (pre-relaunch) numbering in October, when Spidey
# 500 will come out instead of # 59.
Marville
# 7 included complete guidelines for submitting projects to
Marvel Comics' revamped Epic imprint. Fanboys, wannabes, and
H&D employees are coming out of the woodwork with scripts in
hand ... .
Our pal Marc Nathan (from Baltimore
Comic-Con) is putting together a nifty-looking fall anthology
called More
Fund Comics that will benefit the Comic
Book Legal Defense Fund.
Our other pal Rob Allstetter (we've
got two friends!) has posted extensive previews of August-shipping
comics from all the major publishers at his web site, Comics
Continuum.
Rumor king Rich
Johnston is freshly returned from the Bristol Comic Festival,
with lots of DC news this week. Swamp Thing and Firestorm
are mentioned, along with good news for fans of Sandman Mystery
Theatre and Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol (more trades at
last!)
Site to
See
Here at Dragon's Breath
headquarters, we have a massive file of web sites you should
see. Sites that are just too cool, too weird, or too nifty to
ignore.
This week's Site to See is the Wayback
Machine:
This is the search engine of Archive.org,
a web site dedicated to preserving internet history. By
entering web addresses into the Wayback Machine, you can visit sites
exactly as they appeared in the past.
For example, their archive
of heroesanddragons.com allows you to visit our site as early as
July
2, 1998 or as late as May
28, 2002 — one year ago today!
If you know a site we should profile
in Dragon's Breath, tell
us about it.
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