Bargain hunting

So this is Christmas, as I believe someone once said. Magic. Time for me to post the now traditional LLC Christmas picture. Here it is...

Third year in a row I've gone with that. Still sleighs me (geddit?)

Anyway, this Christmas is vastly improved by the fact that Christmas Eve doubles up as new comics day. Quite a busy one at that. I'll be making the trip to Gosh to pick up my festive haul of colourful tat, and I hope to be back four days later for the start of their sale. No ordinary sale this one either, they'll be slashing a host of hardcovers to half price which is going to make shopping at Gosh cheaper than shopping at Amazon. On top of this I can report that the majority of back issues in the basement are now priced at one shiny pound apiece. No rubbish either, all recent stuff in NM condition. Them's some good deals folks!

I'll be splurging the £20 note which Auntie Vi always slips in her Christmas card on some of those goodies. But I have to admit that my bargain hunting has already begun. Yes chums, I've been spunking my dosh freely at The Borders liquidation fest over the past week or two. Picked up some great stuff at 40% discounts (Detroit Metal City vols 1+2, Darwyn Cooke's Spirit vols 1-3, Essential Punisher vol 1) then returned to snaffle up Essential Ghost Rider Volume Two for a fiver on 50% off day, then yesterday braved the post-apocalyptic style clusterfuck of 90% off day at Angel Islington.

Of course the shop had been stripped of most of the decent stuff by the time everything was slashed to 90% off, but this didn't stop the bargain hungry mongs of N1 from fighting over battered copies of Patrick Mower's autobiography and the like. So crazed was the feeding frenzy, that the soon to be jobless staff were forced to make several announcements telling people not to hit each other in the quest for cheap tat.

Blimey.

I still managed to dig out a few treasures in the scrum - Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (£1.70) some crappy compendium of old Western comics (£1.40) and the George Pellecanos novel, The Night Gardner (40p). I'm going up west tonight and am very tempted to stop off in the Oxford Street branch to see if there's owt lying about worth snaffling up. Doubt it, but today's the last day so I feel obliged to check since I'll be in the vicinity.

After that I'll be returning home to wrap presents and eat huge amounts of food. Huzzah! I hope you have a super time too and that Santa unloads a sack of colourful comic goodness all over your eager faces.

See you at the Gosh! sale.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!