The Walking Dead...in church...AAARRGH!

One of the most common advice on collecting comics is that you can find cheap comics in rummage sales.  There's no guarantee you'll find anything of real worth, but then again, it all depends on how you define a gem. 

I was walking around Carroll Gardens and saw a sign for a church rummage sale.  I figured I had some time to kill and decided to check it out.  I wandered a bit and saw clothing, used pots and pans, some paintings, and a long row of books.  I scoured the books and peered into some of the cardboard boxes beneath the tables.  No real comics...until I saw someone handling a lot of The Walking Dead trade paperbacks.  I thought I'd lost out on even inspecting them until I noticed that the gentleman was a church volunteer and was just straightening the books.  I quickly walked over and saw great potential:  Volumes 1-7 and 14 and 16, nine in total, for a buck each.  Considering that they typically retail around $14.99 each, that is a great steal.

I'm not really into horror.  In fact, all I need to know about horror is from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.  Once those shows left the air, I felt no need to indulge in the genre anymore.  How could they improve on it?  Well, since I've never watched The Walking Dead on television nor read the comic, what better way to understand this phenomenon than kicking back and reading hundreds of pages of this horror story?   At just a few cents a page?  And with Volume One in hand, I can start at the beginning.

And you know what's made this deal even sweeter?  I spotted a used Taschen imprint, a book of photos by some German dude.  Taschen produces some great works on terrific stock and they are gorgeous books.  This also cost only a dollar.  So I bought it, sold it at The Strand, and basically paid for my comics.  Voila!  Cost Neutral!  And my daughter's college fund remains untouched.