Groo And My Favorite Comic Book Store

You might think that my favorite place to buy back issues would be my local comic shop, or maybe haunting eBay or perhaps running to a comic book convention, want list in hand.

You’d be wrong.

One of my favorite places to find oddball comics is a thrift shop – you know the kind I mean, the ones with old clothes, chipped glassware and broken Betamaxes. The kind of thrift shop that’s usually run by the Goodwill or the Salvation Army or a local charity organization.

The DNA of antique dealers runs through my veins, straight from my maternal grandfather and on down to me. So as a kid, our family field trips were often to estate sales, drafty auction houses, flea markets and, of course thrift shops. My reward was that sometimes I’d find comics. I once won a box lot of 50 or so good-condition Silver Age DC’s for $10.00, so the rewards were often very nice.

When you’re poking through a thrift shop the condition of whatever comics you find might be too worn for a comic book store to bother with, and a lot of them may be multiple copies of Darker Image #1, but that only makes finding the nugget of gold all the sweeter.

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