21
Appreciation post: that old comic shop in St. Paul with the basement full of bins
Last Saturday I stopped by the shop off Grand Avenue, the one with the faded sign and the cat sleeping on the counter. I spent almost 2 hours digging through their basement long boxes, nothing organized by title or issue, just stacks of random stuff from the 80s and 90s. Found a beat-up copy of New Mutants 98 for 15 bucks, cover's got a crease but the pages are clean. It made me wonder how many other folks actually prefer the messy treasure hunt over those perfectly sorted stores with everything in plastic. Has anyone else found their best stuff in a place that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since 2003?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
ray_miller841mo agoTop Commenter
Three bucks for a beat-up X-Men #1 that's missing the back cover, but hey, the basement smelled like mildew and old pizza so at least the atmosphere was authentic. I'll take the sterile plastic-wrapped shops every time because I actually want to find a specific issue without digging through four boxes of Image Comics variants nobody bought in 1995. The "treasure hunt" is just a fancy way of saying the owner never bothered to sort anything, and that cat on the counter probably shed hair into every bag. Sure, you saved twelve bucks on New Mutants, but you also spent an hour and a half of your Saturday doing work the store should've done for you. Organized stores mean I'm in and out in fifteen minutes with exactly what I came for, and I can actually see the condition before I'm committed. Messy bins are for people who enjoy wasting time, not for people who collect comics.
3