FFF Results Post #190—Bargains

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Four Great Comics You've Found for Free or at a Reduced Price And Something Memorable About One Of Those Transactions." This is how they responded.



Tom Spurgeon

1. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
2. The Eternals #4
3. X-Men #59
4. The Early Morning Milk-Train
5. My dad's copy of The Early Morning Milk-Train was one of a dozen books that I kept upon his passing, and the only one that I hadn't read before.

*****



Marc Arsenault

1. Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs
2. No. 5 Vol. 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto
3. Strontium Dog Search/Destroy Agency Files 04
4. Let's Declare Ourselves Winners ...And Get The Hell Out by Bill Mauldin
5. I have an exceptional collection of Bill Mauldin Books that mainly came from my local library sale for either two dollars each or as part of their bag sale: fill a paper bag with books for three dollars. Because of this I now also own three copies of his most astounding, and I think, best book, Back Home. I also got his Mud & Guts booklet for the Park Service that way. Support your local library!

*****



Tom Neely

1) The Little Monsters -- I don't know where this came from... it must've been in the house since before I was born. It was my first comic book and I read it a million times.

2) TMNT Donatello #1 in a One Issue Micro-series. I got this as a middle-comic in a 3 pack from a drug store called Wackers when i was about 11 years old. I loved the story because it was about an artist who drew monsters that came to life, and then he gets sucked into another dimension. It was around this time that I started telling people I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up.

3) Batman Dark Knight Returns #2 -- traded a G. I. Joe figure (one of the Dreadnaughts) to my friend for this comic that I couldn't seem to find at any of the places that carried comics in my town. I first heard about Frank Miller's Batman from an interview I read in one of my Dad's Playboys that I found in his closet.

4) Grit Bath #1 -- found it in a 25¢ longbox at Starbase 21 comic shop in Tulsa, OK. My first alternative/undergground comic. Totally blew my mind. Made me want to make comics.

5) Dan Clowes's 8 Ball collection Orgybound -- My first Clowes book stolen from my friend Josh. His apartment was such a mess, I used to steal stuff from him all the time just to see if he'd notice things missing. Most of it I returned... but I kept the Orgybound.

*****



Justin Colussy-Estes

1. the Dover Barnaby collection
2. Complete New Yorker Cartoons (for $15!)
3. Silver Surfer #3-4 (1rst series)
4. Iron Wok Jan Vols. 1-15
5. I found the Barnaby collection in a discount bin not three or four months ago for just a few bucks & had that sudden joy of discovery that I associate with my early days of discovering comics, an all-too-rare sensation these days what with internets and gorgeous reprints and all.

*****



Paul Sloboda

1. Doctor Strange #73 (Roger Stern, Paul Smith, Terry Austin)
2. Tintin In Tibet (Hergé)
3. Alley Oop, 1947-1948 (V.T. Hamlin)
4. Cerebus #100-108 (Dave Sim & Gerhard)
5. Those nine issues of Cerebus were bought for me by my friend Mike, at the end of the first comic convention I ever attended. This is where I first learned of the end-of-the-con habit of frenzy selling, where vendors might become amateur auctioneers and yell out some deal for sale with a desired price (like, "nine issues of Cerebus for $2!"). Mike was quick on the draw and handed them to me, and it all went downhill from there. ("You can have nine issues of one comic and still not understand what's going on...? That's so cool...!")

(The rest of the items on the list, I just bought today, so... no associations yet.)

*****



Buzz Dixon

1. Creepy #1 - #6 @ $.25 each (mid-1980s convention special)
2. Eerie #2 - #6 @ $.25 each (mid-1980s convention special)
3. Up Front by Bill Mauldin first edition (purchased new by my father, given to me years later)
4. Back Home by Bill Mauldin first edition (purchased new by my father, given to me years later)
5. Not a comic, but I found a book on a shelf in the Burbank Ikea, placed there to prove the shelf in question could actually hold a book. The book was one of my favorite novels, so I took it down, thumbed through it, noted the indicia page, then asked the store manager if I could buy it. He said no, but he would trade it for a book of equal or larger size. So I hopped in my car, drove all the way home to Chatsworth, grabbed a long out of date computer manual, drove back to Burbank (total round trip 40+ miles), and traded it for a first edition of Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Raintree County.

*****



Justin J. Major

1. The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes 1 - Batman (2nd Hand Bookstore)
2. The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes 2 - Wonder Woman (2nd Hand Bookstore)
3. Krazy & Ignatz TPB 1927 (Fantagraphics Store Back Room)
4. Quimby Mouse TPB (Fantagraphics Store Back Room)
5. Promethea, TPB Books 1-4 for $2.00 TOTAL! at a White Elephant resale store. I nearly had to be hospitalized.

*****



Thomas Scioli

1. Classics Illustrated: The Last Days of Pompeii
2. The Dark Knight Returns
3. Maus
4. Alarming Tales #1
5. Among five or six comics that my father-in-law had found from his childhood and offered me was Alarming Tales #1. I'd never heard of it before, but it turned out to be a comics Holy Grail, containing Kirby's early versions of The Evil Factory, Metron and his Moebius Chair, Kamandi, and what looks like Kirby inventing Ditko's Dr. Strange extra-dimensional landscapes in 1959.

*****



Mark Coale

1. All-Star Comics 37
2. Wonder Woman 187
3. Avengers 247
4. Sandman 8
5. Trident Comics 1

I got Avengers 247 for free from a mom and pop store in Rural Maryland because I showed the owners that I had a letter printed in it.

*****



Frank Santoro

1. stack of coverless Ogden Whitney comics
2. Stark Future #1
3. Conan Treasury by BWS
4. Yummy Fur #9 thru #25 for a dime each.
5. Realizing Yummy Fur #19 ("Showing Helder") is possibly my favorite comic of all time. And then selling the stack to Jim Rugg for 20 bux.

*****



Jeremy Whitley

1. Air
2. Echo
3. Unwritten
4. Maus
5. My non-comic book reading friend Andy and I were having a discussion about how I had never read Maus. The next time I saw him he produced both volumes, telling me his mom had an extra set around just to give away.

*****



Jamie Coville

1. Superman Vol. 1 & 2 and Batman Vol. 2 Archives for $30 total and free shipping (usenet sale).
2. Secret Wars 1-12 for $20 when #8 was worth $20 on it's own (LCS).
3. Batman #386 for free (I was a kid, with my mom sharing a cab with some guys, one of them gave it to me after laughing about Black Masks origin).
4. DP7 #30 for free.
5. It was April, 1996 and I was very new to the internet. I made a post of one of the alt.comics newsgroups mentioning how I loved DP7 but couldn't find the later issues. A guy named Robert Jahrling e-mailed me and offered to send me #30 for free, and did. When it arrived I never loved the internet more than on that day.

*****



Peter MacDonald

1. Amazing Spider-Man #129
2. Daredevil #176
3. Tales of Suspense #29
4. Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action #2
5. Bought Amazing Spider-Man #129 for a dime while on vacation in Bangor, Maine with my family when I was 12 or 13 at a store that had a display of old comics that were in like-new newsstand condition... sold it ten or fifteen years later for $100 to help pay rent.

*****



John Platt

1. Berni Wrightson, Master of the Macabre #2
2. Dark Horse Presents #14
3. Elric #3
4. Dark Horse Presents #56
5. I bought these from a four-for-a-dollar box at a convention. When I got them home and opened them up, I found that they were all autographed by the creators -- including Wrightson, P. Craig Russell, Michael T. Gilbert and John Byrne!

*****



Danny Ceballos

1. Comic Book Confidential promo comic with that amazing Chester Brown cover (free!)
2. All In Color For A Dime paperback (fifty cents at a used book store)
3. Classics Illustrated #11 "Don Quixote" (found in dollar bin)
4. Tantalizing Stories Presents Frank In The River (found in dollar bin)
5. The Comic Book Confidential promo comic is the first comic I ever owned. Back in the late '80s my little brother dragged me into a comic book store for the first time and I only picked this up because it was free and I recognized Lynda Barry's name on the back cover. Talk about jumping down the rabbit hole...

*****



Scott Dunbier

* Nostalgia Press Prince Valiant hardcover
* Nostalgia Press Flash Gordon hardcover
* Origins of Marvel Comics TPB
* Son of Origins TPB
* A copy of Despair, along with several other underground titles, that my friend Lawrence Krauss and I found in a box on the roof of our apartment building when we were both 10 years old.

*****



Philip Rippke

1. Thor #250
2. Savage Sword of Conan #22
3. Fight Man
4. Sleeper #3
5. I grabbed Sleeper #3 from the dollar box just after the end of its first run. It was my first Brubaker/Phillips collaboration. It was far from my last.

*****



Sean Kleefeld

1. The Prisoner (1988)
2. The Return of Pogo (1965)
3. The Middleman (2006)
4. The Complete EC Library: Tales from the Crypt (1979)
5. I won the Tales from the Crypt boxed set from Diamond as part of their contest to promote Free Comic Book Day in 2003, in which they also named me "Comics' #1 Fan." As they haven't held the contest again since then, it's presumably a title I still hold.

*****

please note: I'd usually delete the entries that didn't follow format, because when people don't follow format other people tend to complain and not want to follow format themselves and then complain again that someone else was allowed to do something that they're not allowed to do and I develop a headache and dream of not having a web site. so please follow format in the future. thanks.

*****

topic suggested by Douglas Wolk

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