Singing Serpent is one of my favorite Three Investigators books as well. Your recent column had me pull out my copies of Dead Man’s Riddle and The Screaming Clock last weekend and I had a blast.

Have you read Eyes of the Dragon prior to your recent acquisition of it? It’s one of my favorite Stephen King books, one of those things I’ll recommend to people who don’t like Stephen King because “of all the horror and icky stuff.” Just a great all ages fairy tale/fantasy story with subtle ties to his overall “mythology.”

Our library system has a yearly book sale to get money for new books. One year I bought 80 scienece fiction books for $8. Another year I bought comics and some old records.

The problem with Trinity is that it is a 52-week series. I think it might have been so much better as about 50 weeks. It’s still well written, but seems to be going on too long.

Sandman didn’t seem too long, but 100 Bullets did. Maybe it’s a the-older-I-get thing.

Speaking of the students, yesterday at the store during FCBD I had a 2nd grade teacher who came up to talk to the artists we had at the shop and I gave her the CBR URL and told her to contact you for more info about setting up a program for teaching sequential art, because she’s got 12-15 students “who all read Naruto and DBZ and stuff and they all want to make comics”. So there’s the heads up for that, in case she decides to contact you. I was so swamped with people wanting me to sign stuff I forgot to get her contact info, but she has mine so she may get in touch with me.

“Except that comics cost *way* too damn much these days. Again, this is not news to anyone reading this, but it *does* look really ugly when you lay it all out in black-and-white. Just adding up the acquisitions from last week, an expenditure of about thirteen dollars gained us twelve hardcover books, and all but three of them in like-new condition with dustjackets intact. On the other hand, the remaining ten dollars of that week’s total netted… three standard-format monthly comics. And that was discounted. So if we’re going to cut reading expenses around here, it’s pretty obvious where we should start.”

*shrugs* I don’t know, Greg. If you’d bought half of those books when they originally came out in HC you’d have spent a few hundred dollars. It’s really not fair to compare book scouting to your current comics purchasing. And I don’t know how you fare on comics back issue purchases. I just bought 48 back issues and a TPB for under $40 on FCBD, and the newest back issue I bought is dated April 1990 (ACTION COMICS #652), and the oldest book I think is BRAVE & THE BOLD #95. (It has a 15 cent cover price, so that’s what, 1971? *Opens up the book to check* Yep, April-May, 1971.) The average era of book is between 1976-1983. So we’re talking 20-35 year old backstock, plus a BPRD TPB for $15, so in essence I just got 48 back issues for under $25, so basically fifty cents an issue. And most of the books are VF-NM condition, some in M, some in Fine. See why I offered to shop for you a couple weeks back?

Although I have to admit I’m a bit astounded that you seem to snap up a few new things on an almost daily basis – I can hold out for a week or so.

The average is a LITTLE lower than that. There was a certain amount of ‘retail therapy’ going on that week. If you average it out for April — and I did, yesterday — it works out to a new book or comics trade collection every couple of days. And the Wednesday comics pulls, which are down to two or three a week now.

Which, adding everything up, is still ridiculous and needs to be cut back, I know. At least until we get more shelves in here.

These were donated copies but in near-mint condition, and the donator had even wrapped the dustjackets in Mylar. I don’t care all that much about condition but getting these pristine books was a bonus.

I don’t know if NBM reprinted them in the full newspaper format but these are lovely *large* books, a bit larger than the DC and Marvel Treasury size I think.

The Friends of the Central Arkansas Library System sales in the basement of the downtown Little Rock library every spring & fall aren’t to be missed, either. Unless you’ve moved away to Alabama. Which I have. Dammit.

(On a side note, I always wondered if Steve Gerber’s run on The Defenders was some kind of homage to Drake’s DP — for one thing, there’s almost a one-to-one correspondence between the members of Gerber’s Headmen and Drake’s Brotherhood of Evil — but Gerber expressly denied this, saying Drake’s Guardians of the Galaxy had been a much bigger influence. Ah well!)