Road Trip! (Joplin, MO 2)

I wasn't planning another road trip until the Joplin Collector's Expo in a couple of weeks, but cabin fever was starting to get the best of both me and my youngest.

Then The Clubhouse shared the picture to the left and we knew what needed to happen. We made our first stop on our second trip to Joplin this year.

It turned out the back issues were from another store in town that had decided to stop selling comics in favor of tabletop games. From what I can determine, the store had been having a sale on back issues all summer long and the nineteen boxes were what was left. We found a few treasures including a couple I've been seeking for a while - Adventures of Superman 9 and the first Adventures in the DC Universe Annual.

After The Clubhouse we drove around the corner to a small store we had not visited during our previous trip. It was a small, freestanding building promising "Toys and Collectibles" on its banner and "Toys and Collectables" on the front window. We parked to the side of the building and walked around to the front. The window displays looked nice enough with no faded or well-worn items, but they also blocked any view of the inside. I cautioned my son that it could end up being more of a flea market than the type of place we were looking for.

It actually ended up being clean and well- organized. My son bought a newer Transformer that was lower in price than he had seen at major retailers. I had a conversation with the owner about the challenges of getting old. After we left I realized that the store was not "Gibill's Toys and Collectibles" but "G.I. Bill's..."

We decided our next stop would be Books-a-Million, but then I saw a sign for a store I had only heard about online: Ollie's! Based on what I had seen and read, Ollie's typically offers a large graphic novel section filled floor-to-ceiling with remaindered and slightly damaged copies of sometimes hard-to-find books. Sadly, this Ollie's only had about fifteen titles and somewhere between 1-5 copies of each title. They had multi-comic packs available, but when one side showed a newer DC book and the other side showed an old Valiant title, I figured the three books sandwiched between them were not worth the gamble.

Our next stop was Books-a-Million. We left empty-handed. Our final stop was Heroes and Wizards, which I wrote about in my previous entry. This time when we arrived the owners were standing outside the store talking to two other people. They greeted me warmly but I thought maybe they were locking up early or something so I asked if it was okay to go in. They reassured me it was and this time the small store was full of guys playing Dungeons & Dragons. While I flipped through the back issues they engaged a friendly but serious argument about "magic missile". Anyone familiar with the Dead Alewives skit knows why I couldn't help but snicker at that. After searching through about a dozen short boxes I ended up with five comics. The items in the top row of this pic are from H&W, while the rest were from our first stop.

Overall we had a fun time and found some good stuff, but I was hoping to find more from our actual want list. I can't deny seeing a few interesting things on the highway, though...