As an employee of a comic book shop, i have to deal with a plethora of eccentric personalities. It is a cross i have to bear. I am mostly fine with it. Many of them have become tried and true parts of my life.
The Walking Dead TV fan, however, is a constant source of frustration.
From "Oh wow...they even have a walking dead comic now," to "those toys are stupid, why are they in black and white?" One of my favorites was when i was at the Die Hard marathon screening i overheard "Yo, they are going to re-run the walking dead in black and white so they could get that Night of the Living Dead feel, yo." I promptly got up and changed seats.
I think though, the worst are the people who have actually started to read the comic, but do not understand basic math. You see, the comic is well over 100 issues long at this point, it is sort of a chore to catch up. To his credit, Robert Kirkman, not at all because he wishes to make as much money as humanly possible, has made it easy to catch up. There are something on the order of 18 trade paperback collections, each collecting six issues of the monthly comic. The trades come out almost immediately after the last issue contained within it is released. Because of the speed of release, we see a lot of people drop the monthly in favor of the trade. Conversely, we see almost as many people pick up the monthly because they just cannot wait the 6 or 7 months for the next paperback. Also available, again not at all because they wish to make as much money as possible, are what are referred to as "compendiums" (compendia?). These massive softcover books contain 8 trade paperbacks or 48 issues of the comic. These customers are the ones who make me crazy.
Three times in the last two weeks, I have had people come in asking if we have the third Walking Dead compendium. Each time, the conversation went like this:
Customer: do you have the third walking dead compendium...yknow...the big books?
me: Sir (it's always a guy. i know, you thought "bad at math, must be a woman." you are a monster), there have been 110 issues of the comic, and 18 trade paperbacks. Each of the books you have collect 8 trade paperbacks, which leaves you 6 shy of the next compendium. At 6 issues per book, hoping the book maintains a monthly shipping schedule, you are looking at a minimum three year wait for your next book. The compendium volumes are a good catch up, but it would be my recommendation to grab volumes 17 and 18, and get yourself on a maybe twice a year schedule if you wish to follow the story in a reasonable time frame.
Customer: oh...ok...i'll wait.
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
These are not "oh, all the books have to match of my bookshelf" nerds (as i am one of those), these are just people who are reading to cool popular thing, who have such a fleeting interest in the material that they do not actually care about it. I just do not understand it.
Oh, the show is terrible and Carl gets shot in the face and loses an eye and has a gaping hole in his skull. oops...spoiler alert.
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