There's This 35-Year-Old Who's Totally Into Graphic Novels …

As of this weekend, the popular and critically acclaimed purveyor of power and pulchritude has been around for three and a half decades.

That's gotta be about, what, at least three times as old as Peter Parker in the latest Spider-Man reboot? But just old enough to be a perennial Best Of Austin winner and one of the city's favorite places to grab the latest comics – whether its comics with panels bursting from the onslaught of the super-powered and Spandex-clad, or less steroidal and more calmly drawn narratives filled with deeper depictions of Real Life As Lived By Human Beings, or some compelling mixture of both, from the likes of Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics and Top Shelf and PictureBox and Oni and First Second and so on – and even, yeah, from those two eternal rivals, Marvel and DC. Not to mention the graphic-novel divisions of Pantheon and Harper Collins and Soft Skull and McSweeney's and – oh, just too damned much goodness to consider without spraining one's already over-stretched Collecting Muscle.

Of course, ABC (as it's colloquially known) is now a triple-threat of retail comics fantasy, having not only the main store at North Lamar … but also Guzu Gallery right next door … and their righteous repository of remaindering, the Sidekick Store, over there in the offices behind the Half Price Books HQ at the corner of Lamar and Koenig.

And we just wanted to hip you to the fact of this anniversary, true believer, especially because the stores are celebrating by having a humongous series of sales this weekend. And so you can get a lot of the things you'd usually get, or have been wanting to get, or didn't think you'd be able to afford for a while, at heroically reduced prices.

Word to the wise, eh?