Monday 21 March 2011

MART!

Good God, has it really been seven months since I hit up a Royal National Stinkathon?

Ridiculous. I am ashamed.

Sadly, yesterday's affair was a bit of a let down on the comic buying front. I blame the noticeable decrease in 25p boxes. Mr Krypton, the cock who normally rules the 25p roost, had ditched his cheap tat completely, replacing it with one of his famous "50% off silver age sales." Lots of mylar. Not much value. It was ever thus. Bah!

I loitered at Heroclix man's stall for a bit, but his Man-Toy prices have hit absolutely insane levels. As pretty as it was I wasn't going to give him £15 for his Surtur figure - it's £3 on ebay you robbing little gimp! And what about those issues of Kick-Ass he had pinned up behind him?! £20 for number #1, tenner for the others? Is he melting his Heroclix down and smoking them? If anyone bought those they should be burned on the huge pile of money that they can clearly afford to set fire to!

I should have bought the 2000AD #1 that was going on one stall for £35, but I balked and bottled it at the decisive moment. It was a decent copy, and £35 was a fair price, but my days of paying £35 for a comic are behind me for the moment.

So what did I buy? Nothing much. An old 2000AD I needed for £1.75. A couple of Marvel Handbooks which I probably already have, a Captain America issue featuring MODOM for 40p and one of the three remaining issues of the original Iron Man Armor Wars that I'm missing for 50p. That's it.

No matter, for Mr Bishop was on hand to brighten my day with a stack of 2000AD doubles that he didn't need. For those that don't know he recently scored the first 300 issues for NOTHING on Freecycle. Ridiculous. Also in attendance were LLC readers Tam and Dex. We had a nice yarn about comics in the shitty pub next door, procuring a window seat from where we watched King Stinker rifling through the bins for food, and various miserable dealers packing up box after box of unsold tat into their comic vans. Heroclix man had the nicest motor. No surprise there.

4 comments:

James Riley said...

I went to the mart yesterday. did my usual pre-buy scan of the room for 25p boxes and was similarly dissapointed. Did get some good stuff for 50p a pop though...Is there somekind of predictive element to this? do mounds of 25p comics come in waves or has everyone raked their prices up?

Dom said...

Haven't been for a while so not sure if it's an ongoing trend or a one-off. You should've said you were going and joined us. Always happy to meet new chums!

James Riley said...

Thanks for the invite, will let you know next time I'm heading along.

There was one stall in the first room selling five comics for £2 did you see that one? a really odd collection of stuff: doubles of single issues of the maxx, dr. strange and master of kung fu being notable ones. A lot of them were also..kind of...er, damp....

Anonymous said...

Just to clarify, Mr Sutton. Not a complete set, missing issues 3 and 7. But actually going all the way up to 556! And half a dozen annuals as well! Thrill-power overload!

It's bloody annoying that 25p boxes are dying out. They should have 10p boxes dammit!