Along with my ‘regular’ purchases, stopped off at the other local comic shop, looking primarily for the Superman/Wonder Woman issue I was now missing in the current storyline…or so I thought. (Turns out the missing chapter is an issue of Batman/Superman, which would have been a really useful bit of information to have consciously had!
Not finding what I was there for, I hit the bargain bins and found a bunch of 25-cent comics of interest.
I also found another Ultraforce figure that I don’t believe I’d found before: Topaz.
Best thing is the figure was only $2…a real “no brainer” for me for sure!
I came across a bunch of Showcase issues. Here are the handful of Showcase ’93 and the couple Showcase ’96 I found. The Two-Face one–a chapter of Batman: Knightfall–is a duplicate, but one worth having, if only for filing purposes.
And the gem of the bunch, the back half of Showcase ’94…making it relatively easy to mentally track…I just need to find issues 1-5!
Most of Strangers 1-16. A bunch of those early issues are apparently ‘variants’ in that they have the UPC/barcode on the covers instead of “nothing” or a non-barcode that many “direct market” books had from this time period. Normally I’m not one for variants, but finding a near-complete run of a bunch of issues make it well worthwhile, especially for the price of one single contemporary Marvel issue.
Turok, Sovereign Seven, and The Man of Steel were lone #1 issues…but what the hey? I’m half interested in how many copies of Turok I can amass; and the others never hurt to have extras. The “ashcans” were cool finds–I have ’em all somewhere, but they’re rather rare (in my experience) due to their size…either not being filed with comics that are then sold, or “hiding” because they’re smaller and thus passed over…at least in bargain bins.
I know I have at least a couple of these Justice League America issues, but while pulling them I’d hoped there would be more, and then figured until I get my collection actually sorted again, not gonna hurt too much to have a larger isolated ‘run’ for now.
I found myself working toward an ‘even number’ for my mental math of my stack, so grabbed a couple random-ish issues. One of the store workers was sorting through a small box of comics and tossed some more “recent” releases on the quarter bins…functionally giving me first crack at ’em, so I snagged the bottom row above.
Whether I get around to them sooner than later or not, I always enjoy finding Superman comics from before the Death of Superman, and then several of the others are just ones I like, particularly for the iconic covers from an age when such things could stand uniquely and not be lost in an overwhelming sea of variants.
The older issue of Action Comics where Clark tells Lois he’s Superman is a first print…I recall there being at least two printings, so it’s cool to snag an extra copy of a first print like this.
Not that I’m unaware of it or anything, but I’m such a sucker for the ’90s, and continue to enjoy these finds much more than most new comics.
And while I recognize that I’m rather “spoiled” right now with relatively easy access to a number of shops with 25 and 50 cent bins and various bargain-bins…it’s still apalling to consider that I can buy 64 such comics like this…for the same price a mere FOUR new Marvel comics of 20 pages each. 80 pages of story, or 64 entire issues? Not hard to see the better value when one enjoys the bargain-bin finds.
I just wish I had so much more time to actually dig in and read and re-read stuff more frequently.
Filed under: 2016 Non-Review posts, 2016 posts, NON-REVIEW CONTENT, The Weekly Haul | Tagged: Action Comics, ashcans, bargain bins, DC Comics, Justice League, Showcase, Superman, Ultraforce, Ultraverse Revisited, weekly hauls | 1 Comment »
Comic Reviews by Walt 