So the third New York Comic Con is one for the annals and I have stopped twitching.

It was, at its Saturday afternoon height, a cauldron of mad, chaotic energy. (And wasn’t it dangerous? Couldn’t all that energy, confined and concentrated by four walls, affect the hearts of atoms and cause the forces that bind them together to disintegrate us all into quarks that would join the neutrinos in spewing through the universe?) That’s okay, for me, in small doses, and maybe in large doses for you, especially if you’re young and new to the megacon scene.

I won’t bother describing the event for you. If you frequent this site, you probably already have all pertinent information. Instead, a tiny, personal note:

Every one of the panels on which I sat was interesting and, I was happy to see, well-attended, which hasn’t always been the case in huge cons, where it sometimes seems that the exchange of currency is more important than honoring and discussing and learning about an art form. But the absolute, stone, hands-down high point came early, on Friday night, when I shared a stage with Peter Sanderson, who moderated, and Gary Freidrich, Joe Sinnott, and Stan Goldberg. Except for Peter, we were all veterans of Marvel’s early days, before the company became Marvel Entertainment and attached its logo to vastly expensive motion pictures, soon to play at a multiplex near you, back when it just published comic books – all kinds of comic books, not just the superhero kind – and there were no multiplexes in which to show ridiculously costly films, even if such films had existed.

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Until not too long ago, I worked for a newspaper as a police reporter, filing stories about homicides and then covering comic books in my free time. Thankfully, the worlds of real violence and superhero battles never intersected.

For the owner of Apparitions Comics and Books in Kentwood, MIch., violence became all too real Friday night, when police say a man went into the store, demanded money from David Pirkola, 56, then shot Pirkola and fled. The Grand Rapids Press has the full story.

First, best wishes to Pirkola for a speedy recovery. He’s listed in critical but stable condition.

One heartening aspect of this terrible news is the response from the comic book community, including owners of competing shops:

[Stephen] Jahner, who owns Capital City Collectibles in Lansing, said Pirkola enjoys role-playing games and is well known in comic circles for his devotion to the store.

He said he was informed of the shooting from another Apparitions employee, and together they will try to keep the shop open until Pirkola recovers.

Other Grand Rapids comic store owners said they were shocked to hear about the shooting.

"Comic-book store owners tend to have an affinity for each other," said Kirby Tardy, owner of Tardy’s Collector’s Corner, 2009 Eastern Ave. SE.

"It’s a tough business, and it takes a lot of love to keep it going."