We put out a call for purportedly “new” books mangled in the shipping process by Amazon, but Kain wanted us to see what happened when he tried to buy a graphic novel at Barnes & Noble. This book had different characters’ origin stories condensed into single pages, so of course they slapped a giant anti-theft sticker right in the middle of one of those pages. But that’s okay–it’s not like people who buy comics care about keeping the books in prime condition, right?

Kain writes:

I went to a Barnes & Noble store to kill some time a little bit ago and I decided to look at a few of the graphic novels they had there. I found one from Marvel with the origin story of many of their characters condensed into single page comics. I thought this might be cool to add to my collection and set down to read a little to see if it was worth buying. I am glad I did because when I got to the origin story of Black Cat I found a nice surprise put in there by Barnes and Noble staff I assume. Right in the corner of a panel was one of those large white anti theft stickers with the metal strips in them. Note that this type of book is usually bought by collectors and those stickers are made to never come off. So what we end up with is a collectable item that is destroyed by a sticker in a panel and if you remove it it will rip the page up making it just as useless.

Also it was the only one they had on the shelf. The employee I talked to about it said that it was their store’s policy to put the stickers in certain items so they are not stolen and that they could not sell me one without the sticker somewhere in it.

Well, you could try buying from Amazon, but we’ve already seen how well that works out. Back to the local comics store, I guess.

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