Tales From the Comic Book Bargain Bins

It has been a long time since the last post, and there are good reasons.

To recap my comic book adventure, I sort of fell into them as a grown adult looking for something his children could read and finding new an exciting adventures that were tailored… to grown adults. I wasn’t the normal comic book fan, who have a tendency to come across as having collected comics for more years than they have been alive.

I tried to distance myself from that mentality and focused more on the limited series that had self contained plots. Essentially, avoiding superhero comics.

But here’s what I’ve learned. To collect a good series, you need to buy them new. If you don’t then acquiring them in the secondary market is at least twice as costly. And then comes the tricky part… you don’t know which series will be awesome, and which ones will make you shake your head for days… wondering why oh why was that ever printed? Not to mention that you can’t unload them on the secondary market because you are not the only one disappointed with the launch.

Looking back I can see this was my motivation for my 1 vs 1 reviews (where I compared two number 1 issues) and my One Two Reviews (where I reviewed the first two issues of a series as one whole, usually to determine whether I’d keep reading).

These were fun and quirky posts, but ultimately I became uncomfortable with the amount of money I was spending on these issues.

And that’s when I started looking in the bargain bins, which are almost always going to be full of superhero titles.

I’ve learned that a good superhero issue will provide enough of a recap at the beginning or through other writerly devices to make the storyline accessible to new readers. Operative phrase here is ‘a good superhero issue’.

Another thing I try to stick to is to only buy titles that have multiple issues availble. They don’t have to be sequential. I’ve purchased some that are pretty far apart, but I find buying 5 issues for two different titles more enjoyable to read than 5 random issues.

In anycase, when I have time (maybe tomorrow. maybe next year.) I’ll review a couple of those titles. Maybe.