One of the many decisions you will need to make regarding your wedding and reception is how you want to handle your wedding music. Most brides and grooms elect to either have a pianist or an organist along with a wedding singer in some cases handle the…

Trade-paperbacks I buy online. Amazon, Deepdiscount, Milehigh Comics, E-bay, etc. It’s insane. Sometimes you can get 40-50% off and pay pennies on the dollar for issues that cost $2.99. Plus, you already know that the stories are good and you’ll like them.

Backissues, I get from E-bay, Milehigh comics (when there’s a sale) and from my business & family trips. Trust me, scavenging the one-dollar bins is a great way to kill a weekend when you are stuck in Jackson, Mississippi or Tallahassee, Florida for an extended period of time.

But I really like to support my local shop (Infinite Monkey Comics and Games, in Oberlin, OH) as much as I can. I buy all my new issues and whatever trades I can, from the shop, whose owners are, hands-down, the nicest comic shop owners/employees I’ve met in my 20-odd years of on-again, off-again reading and collecting. They have a nice variety of issues, are great with pull lists, and are wonderful about getting in things I’ve heard or read about online that they might not otherwise carry. And as Josh Olive noted above, the sense of conversation and community– of talking about new issues, making recommendations to each other, laughing about the absurdities of Civil War or whatever–is what makes it fun. Ever since I was a kid, the comics shop was kind of a magical space: I was eleven when I first walked into the LCS in my hometown, and the sight of all those new issues, and boxes of back issues, posters on the wall and so on, really made comics buying a fun ritual. After an intense collecting period in my youth, I stopped reading comics for about a decade, then picked up the habit again in grad school. The shop in that town was ok, but my current LCS is really great, and stopping by on my way home from work on Wednesdays is a wonderful way to beat the winter cold.

Graphic novels I get at the comics store, Borders, or occasionally Amazon (plus used bookstores or the library book sale, but that’s not something I count on). I’ve also acquired some from online book trading (mostly replacing monthlies I already own).

Manga I almost invariably get at Borders, or rarely from B&N, Waldenbooks, or online. My comics shop doesn’t really carry manga; I used to get some through pre-order, but that stopped when my monthly purchases of both comics and manga grew large enough to make that impractical.

If he doesn’t have something that I’m looking for, I usually just order it on-line, and then have the fun of waiting for the UPS man.

Believe it or not, I’ve been planning at “where I get my back issues” post comparing 1988, 1998, and 2008. I guess I should get on that.

It’s not really a job, in that I’m not really being paid .. money. I get store credit at a dollar amount per hour spent “on the clock”. Which I then use to “pay for” all things comics related, at a slight discount. SO I add around $2K cover price in stuff per year just for standing around and looking pretty a few hours, 1-3 days a week. About half the time I’m there I’m actually working, helping people, tho often with radio-control parts and services, not comics. The other half of the time I’m pretty much free to do whatever, so I often read comics, which often feeds what collected books I eventually buy. Plus I borrow from the library a lot for stuff I don’t have a pressing desire to own.

(I do sometimes actually pay for things, when I don’t have enough credit to cover a week’s delivery or it’s really expensive, like those Absolute books.)

Unfortuneately most of the comics clientele the shop has isn’t very talkative. Of our small “subscriber” base, the big spenders are get in/get out types, and there’s never more than a couple people there at a time (very rural area), comics or otherwise.

Sometimes I buy from Amazon or the Waldenbooks in the mall. (I bought my first comics at Waldenbooks way back in 1984. Okay, my mom bought them, but still.) Sometimes I go to a real comics shop and get my fingers dirty.