Loot!

By | Wednesday, March 05, 2008 1 comment
The Wednesday lunch hour found me, as usual, perusing my Local Comic Shop. I picked up the handful of new books I was looking for, and found a cheap copy of Rick Spears' Dead West in a discount bin. The shop owner, taking a quick break from the usual chaos of New Comic Day, pulls out a decent-sized cardboard box and places it on the counter.

"Hey, Sean! You might be interested in some of this."

"What's that?"

"It's an old customer's file. We'd been holding books for him for a while but he seems to have disappeared. He never comes in any more, and we haven't been able to get a hold of him. I told him that I'd keep pulling his books for six months and his time's up now. He was getting some off-beat stuff you might be interested in if you want to pull anything out of here."

The box in question had maybe 200-300 fairly new comics from the past several months. There was a good mix of indie publishers, plus a handful of marvel books. I rifled through the box's contents and pulled out any titles that looked interesting. Once I had a stack of six or eight titles, running from one to six issues each, I looked through those books a little more carefully.

Sure enough, there were two titles that, on closer inspection, looked pretty cool -- one of which I had never even heard of before.

The owner was appreciative of being able to get rid of what otherwise would be fairly dead weight and gave me an extra 5% discount. It just struck me as an interesting and novel way to deal with what must be a recurring problem at comic shops across the U.S.
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1 comments:

Back when I had my store, rummaging through delinquent pull boxes was one of my favorite things to do on a Sunday afternoon. It was really like searching for buried treasure, especially when you found a book that you had been sold-out of for quite some time, but recently a regular customer or two asked you about its availability.

I found a complete run of The Dark Tower, various issues of Civil War and World War Hulk, a Captain America #25, the one shot Sinestro Corps War Special, just to name a few. On a few occasions, I think I got a little too excited about finding the book.