[Bin Beat] Sickly Saturday

What could keep a back issue fiend like me away from his semi-regular hunting schedule?  Certainly not the flu, that’s for sure!

Personal bit here… my wife is a school teacher, and from time to time she brings home something given to her from her students.  Sometimes it’s candy and chocolates, sometimes it’s stuffed toys, flowers, and coffee mugs… and sometimes it’s bronchitis and conjunctivitis.  Last week our home turned into a tissue and cough drop wrapper infested mess.  She fell ill first and despite our best efforts, managed to pass it along to me.  Come the weekend, we were both feeling a bit better and she had some business to attend to across town.  So I figure… what the hell, we don’t drive that far out too often, maybe I’ll hit some bins while we’re there.

After all, what better thing to do as you’re recovering from illness than dredge through filthy used comic books?  Was it worth my while?  Well, let’s see…

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Our first stop was the Half Price Books that we did not visit during their Valentine’s Day coupon sale.  This shop is probably 50 or so miles from home, and offers the most frustrating and convoluted comic book section of any store I’d ever visited.  I’ve been to garage sales with more organized comic book “sections”.  While flipping through their quarter piles… yeah, piles… they have a few shelves with just piles of ragged and falling apart comics.  Anyways, while flipping through the piles, I got excited to find a decent cache of Gen13 issues from toward the end of their first ongoing series.  I snapped them up, and then realized they were all tagged at $8.00 each… in the quarter books area.  Lame.

There were a couple of “New Format” books from the 80’s I would have grabbed, however… and here’s a word to the wise… the yellow “Clearance” HPB price tags just love to take some of the cover art with them when you remove them from the book.  Never buy DC “New Format” books that have a price tag on their covers.  I’d been burned by that a time or two, and not like I am buying these for their pristine condition or re-sell-ability… I just really don’t want any books in my collection to have chunks of art gouged off their covers.

That having been said, I did not leave empty handed.  I grabbed the last issue of New-52 Superman that I needed… so there’s one monkey off my back.  Also found New Titans #92, which I discovered I didn’t actually have during my last Titans read through.  They were not priced, so they were half-cover price.  Glad to have plugged that hole.

On our way home, we stopped at the same used bookstore we went to a few weeks earlier.  I wasn’t expecting much, as I’d cleaned them out during our last visit.  Much to my surprise, in the 40-cent area they added a whole bunch of Green Lantern.  I was able to complete my Green Lantern volume 4 (pre-Flashpoint) run, which was one of the casualties of my mid-2000’s mortgage-fueled comics purge, so I’m glad to have finally wrapped that one up.

DCBS Delivery!

Was surprised to find an issue of Green Lantern: Mosaic that I didn’t have (#18)… Now I just need issue #12 to have the set.  Had a couple of finds from Titans vol.1… down to just 2 more issues of that run for the set.

Upon returning home I was surprised to find that this week’s DCBS order delivered a few days earlier than expected.  I’ve been using Discount Comic Book Service since around the time of The New-52!, and think they are fantastic.  There’s no way I’d be able to keep up with these books otherwise…

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That’s about it.  Fairly productive outing, as I continue to gear up for that mythical time in the future where I will have all the time in the world to read through my collection.  Knowing me, if that time ever came… I wouldn’t even know where to start!

Thanks for reading.