Chris Giarrusso’s cover to Venom War #1
I wrote a few weeks ago that I’ve never been a big buyer of back issues of comic books, I generally buy new comic books, but this summer I bought a bunch of issues of early 1970s Sub-Mariner. That has turned into a little bit of a trend for me as over the last month or so I bought a few other back issues from the web.
First off most of the comic books that I buy are new comics. I have a pull list at my local comic book store which means that they order and hold the new issue of certain comics each month for me. That makes life easy for the store and for me.
My shop (Comics Warehouse in Pearl River NY) also sends me an email each week with the “Final order cutoff” for the comics that will be out in a month. That means that it’s the last time I can order a given comic (that’s not already on my pull list) and be guaranteed of getting it. All I had to do is click on a button in the email and they’ll order and hold the comic for me.
I like getting that email each week and seeing the comics I can order. It helps me find new comics to read and to order specific things that I might not usually get.
When it comes to comic books I’m mostly an indie comic book reader. That means I’m not usually interested in Marvel or DC comics. I have none on my pull list. But an artist that I know (Scott Koblish) was doing some alternate covers on some X-Men books. I thought they were cool and wanted them. The only problem was that the first one slipped by me. I didn’t see it in the email and so didn’t get to order it. My comic shop tried to reorder it for me but it was sold out and they couldn’t get it. I had to turn to eBay.
It’s easy to get recent back issues off of Ebay but the problem is the price. Really it’s the cost of shipping. As I found out when buying those issues of Sub-Mariner this summer if I’m buying just a single comic book the shipping cost is going to be about $5. Most sellers are willing to place multiple comics in the same order for about that same shipping price but I wasn’t buying multiple issues.
In the end I paid around $15 for that X-Men #35 with the Scott Koblish cover and that was the cheapest price I found it for. I thought maybe that the price was so high (I bought others in the series for about $5-$6) because it was the first of the covers and it slipped by a lot of people. When I got the book I saw the retail price on it was $10 so that plus the $5 shipping made up the $15 price so I really didn’t pay any kind of premium for it.
After that happened the same thing happened to me again. Another artist that I know (Chris Giarrusso) is doing some alternate covers for a Venom comic. I wanted to get those but, again, the first issue slipped by me. There were so many Venom comics and so many alternate covers that I didn’t see #1. I got my preorder in for issue one in time but the Wednesday (new comic day) that Venom War #1 came out my comic shop had none of the alternate cover I wanted. So I went to eBay and ordered it for about $10.
A big order for back issues that I bought was from Lone Star Comics which has a website called mycomicshop.com. I’ve ordered from them a bit over the years because they have a lot of indie comics for cheap. I’ve filled in a bunch of series that I was missing issues of since I discovered them a lot of years ago. I keep a want list of comics on their site and decided to buy some stuff of off it. Mostly cheap stuff but it adds up and in the end I spent about $100, tax and shipping included, on 29 comics. I ended up finishing three series.
I bought the nine issues of Jeff Smith’s “Bone” that I was missing. Though this classic series is available in a few different collected editions I don’t have any of them. I haven’t liked any of the physical books they’ve put it out in so I wanted to complete my collection of the individual issues. I reread the whole series in its digital version on my iPad last year (as I commuted) and that made me want to get the rest of the comics even more.
The second series that I finished up was “Route 666” from Crossgen Comics in the early 2000s. It was back in September of 2023 that I decided to try and buy this whole series. I bought issues 1-19 for just $22 tax and shipping included on eBay. That was the cheapest I could find them but the last three issues of the series were missing. So I put them on my want list and there they sat until I finally decided to buy them about a year later.
Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” was the third series I finished off. Almost. I only bought four issues of it but that was all I needed. There are four volumes of SIP and the first one is the most expensive. There are only three issues in that volume and I already have a third printing of #1 but don’t have 2 and 3. I do have a collected edition with them in it though. These four issues completed volume two and I already had volumes three and four. I’m going to reread the whole thing one day.
The final series that I filled in were eleven issues of David Lapham’s “Stray Bullets.” That was another series from the 1990s that I was late to and missed the first 12 or so issues but I had them in collected editions. I finally decided that I wanted the original issues too.
Though I like collected editions of comics a lot I also like individual issues. Comics as periodicals are fun to read. There is only one chance to read them when they initially are printed and I like that experience. It’s also fun to thumb through a pile of old comics because they’re like a time machine. You can look into the past and watch the months roll buy as you go form issue to issue. That’s good stuff.