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shewhomustAbout ten days ago, a bookstall turned up at the market, with a stack of rather weatherbeaten comics down at one end. I asked the price - think it was £1.50 each - enough to make it worth carrying on looking. Ended up buying a couple of issues of The Legion of Night, plus a Lucifer trade paperback for a fiver, plus a pen with the address of the bookshop on it, and feeling quite good about the deal.
This is what my trusty Slings and Arrows Guide to comics says about The Legion of Night:
Which is interesting, because my own reaction traversed the same territory but in the opposite direction: this looks like fairly standard horror stuff, but it is Steve Gerber, and actually, reading it, hey, he's good, isn't he? And hang on a minute, Fin Fang Foom, you're not serious? You are? Well, I enjoyed it.
The Mike Carey Sandman spin-off Lucifer, on the other hand, continues to get good reviews, and I continue not to get it. This trade paperback brings together two stories, in the first of which an unscrupulous blond with magical powers (have we met before, or am I thinking of someone else?) does heaven a favour, and in the second his attempt to find out just what he has gained by this demonstrates still further what a nasty piece of work he is. It was an entertaining read, but I didn't feel the need to dash out and buy more (and the things I particularly liked about the set-up came from the source material, not from Carey's handling of it). A dramatic Fegredo cover (Fegredo re-worked, in fact, and I wished they'd included more of his covers).
So when we were looking at where to walk this weekend, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler said "How about walking to Crook and getting the bus back?", I put in a counter-bid: "How about walking to Bishop Auckland and visiting the bookshop?" and that's what we did.
Buying random comics at a moderate price in the market is the old-fashioned way; going to a specialist shop and paying the list price is the modern way. The shop in Bishop Auckland offered the worst of all worlds. It was primarily a bookshop, and the books were sorted and priced, but there was a big table with comic boxes on it, and more comics stacked underneath it, roughly sorted - that is, issues of a given title were more or less in one place - but without any real indication of where any given title might be. And the price was £2 a copy - apparently regardless of condition or collectability.
Perhaps I'm living in the past, but I thought that was too high as an average price: for a water-damaged issue of the Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson Steed and Mrs Peel, say, or the J.M. DeMatteis Dr Fate. Paperback books were individually priced at £2.99, two for a fiver, and when we went to buy a couple (Anne Fine's In Cold Domain and Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels, my copy having mysteriously vanished) the price dropped to £4 for the two - yet the comics remained at comfortably above what they had cost new, even though I'd made it clear that there were things there I would have bought had they been cheaper.
What irritated me, I think, was the sense that the comics were being treated as something that would fetch a high price, but which, despite that, didn't deserve any respect in terms of how they were displayed.
On the other hand, if anyone is missing one or two issues of Shade, the Changing Man, they could do worse than visit Bondgate Books.
This is what my trusty Slings and Arrows Guide to comics says about The Legion of Night:
"Fin Fang Foom. A depraved religious cult. Steve Gerber. Whilce Portacio and Scot Williams. Demons, sex and a modern-day witch. All sounds rather exiting, doesn't it? Sadly, it isn't. It's a formulaic old horror plot padded out for ninety-six pages with some mystical mumbo-jumbo."
Which is interesting, because my own reaction traversed the same territory but in the opposite direction: this looks like fairly standard horror stuff, but it is Steve Gerber, and actually, reading it, hey, he's good, isn't he? And hang on a minute, Fin Fang Foom, you're not serious? You are? Well, I enjoyed it.
The Mike Carey Sandman spin-off Lucifer, on the other hand, continues to get good reviews, and I continue not to get it. This trade paperback brings together two stories, in the first of which an unscrupulous blond with magical powers (have we met before, or am I thinking of someone else?) does heaven a favour, and in the second his attempt to find out just what he has gained by this demonstrates still further what a nasty piece of work he is. It was an entertaining read, but I didn't feel the need to dash out and buy more (and the things I particularly liked about the set-up came from the source material, not from Carey's handling of it). A dramatic Fegredo cover (Fegredo re-worked, in fact, and I wished they'd included more of his covers).
So when we were looking at where to walk this weekend, and
durham_rambler said "How about walking to Crook and getting the bus back?", I put in a counter-bid: "How about walking to Bishop Auckland and visiting the bookshop?" and that's what we did.Buying random comics at a moderate price in the market is the old-fashioned way; going to a specialist shop and paying the list price is the modern way. The shop in Bishop Auckland offered the worst of all worlds. It was primarily a bookshop, and the books were sorted and priced, but there was a big table with comic boxes on it, and more comics stacked underneath it, roughly sorted - that is, issues of a given title were more or less in one place - but without any real indication of where any given title might be. And the price was £2 a copy - apparently regardless of condition or collectability.
Perhaps I'm living in the past, but I thought that was too high as an average price: for a water-damaged issue of the Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson Steed and Mrs Peel, say, or the J.M. DeMatteis Dr Fate. Paperback books were individually priced at £2.99, two for a fiver, and when we went to buy a couple (Anne Fine's In Cold Domain and Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels, my copy having mysteriously vanished) the price dropped to £4 for the two - yet the comics remained at comfortably above what they had cost new, even though I'd made it clear that there were things there I would have bought had they been cheaper.
What irritated me, I think, was the sense that the comics were being treated as something that would fetch a high price, but which, despite that, didn't deserve any respect in terms of how they were displayed.
On the other hand, if anyone is missing one or two issues of Shade, the Changing Man, they could do worse than visit Bondgate Books.
