As the night wore on and I basically got down to just inspecting every corner of the store, I found their 50 cent boxes underneath the kids comics and rummaged through there. Among a sea of House of M #8s, I found Midnight Men #1, 2, and 4. Sadly, it was 50 cents or four for a dollar, but I rounded it off with the first issue of the World of Metropolis miniseries.

Just finished #2 and now I really wanna go back and pay 2.50 for the third issue to finish it up. It’s not fantastic but it’s pretty interesting and definitely was worth the change I spent on it.

I remember when I was a kid, and my neighborhood store suddenly stopped charging sales tax on back issues. They’d been caught for that very thing. I wonder if the CBLDF would cover that?

Another title that was part of the Heavy Hitters line was Sachs and Violens by Peter David. S&D later showed up in the last two issues of DC’s Fallen Angel, and stayed with the title in the 18 year chronology gap between the end of the DC run and starting at IDW.

I’m going to have some upcoming posts on the Fallen Angel series, including a review of Sachs and Violens – which is due to be released by DC in TPB format before the end of the year – at my blog.

That’s interesting about Hansen. On the back of this issue is a drawing he did as Spyder from a couple of years earlier. It’s actually pretty good. And I remember seeing the ads for Whisper in other First books when he first started, and the art looks very good. I wonder why he changed his style. I hope it wasn’t just to look KEWL. That would be a shame.

Neil Hansen, BTW, worked on Whisper for First Comics unde the name “Spyder”. He showed a lot of promise at the time. That’s another great book from the quarter bin!

But I can’t believe that no one has commented on the revelation that these books do not, in fact, come from the quarter bin. Whotta scandal! This should be covered in “Urban Legends”.

My greatest achievement, though, was getting around half a dozen Kirby Black Panthers, about eight Sienkiewicz Moon Knights, and four issues of SOLO (Paul Pope, Tim Sale, Richard Corben, and one other) out of a bin. The BP and MKs aren’t complete runs, but man, what a steal.

I say “a few years ago” because, frankl, I think I looted the cream of the crop from those boxes. I’v found stuff like Good-condition issues of Moench/Gulacy Master of Kung Fu from the 70s in quarter boxes before. Granted, I’ve found a lot more material like Untamed….

Still, realistically, the reason something ends up in a quarter box is usually because either A) it’s damaged or B) it’s crap. And 99 times out of a hundred, it’s “B.” We stocked up on quarter books at the show a couple of weeks ago, for Halloween — we like giving out comics instead of candy, it’s more fun and that way there’s no candy around the house that we end up eating and replacing — and Julie kept having to check with me about whether or not books were really appropriate to give out to the neighborhood kids. Roughly one third of what she showed me I ended up saying, “No,” not so much because it was age-inappropriate but because it was so badly-done that the kids would hate it, as well as being part of some convoluted continuity mess that made it incomprehensible as a stand-alone piece. The books that made the cut were mostly Archies, Topps licensed stuff, and the Milestone line. There were a couple of Groos in there too but Julie said we should keep those for ourselves.

Where was I? I had a point… oh, yeah. I know we are spending our own money on this stuff and thus quarter boxes are the way to go, but sometimes it seems like kicking a cripple. If you find it there it’s already got a couple of strikes against it. Once in a while you might try this exercise with a five-dollar budget in the spendier back issue bins, or with “the seventh indie book I see” at a small comics show, or something, and see how it shakes out.