Aside from that, my back issue purchases are confined mostly to my bi-annual San Diego trips. I’d way rather have the Haney/Aparo Brave and Bolds in the original than the Showcases. I also like to pick up random silver age SF and monster comics, 80 Page Giants, Marvel and DC treasuries/digests, early 1970s issues of Action, Superman, Superboy and best of all, 100 Page Super Spectaculars (which left the stands one month before I started getting comics in 1975, and have always had a mystical appeal for me). And I’ll often pick up stray back issues of Teen Titans Go, Transformers or other kids’ books for my sons.

I tend to buy trades if they’re out in paperback at the time I hook into a new series that I want a complete run of, and then I’ll stick with the individual issues (ie I bought the first g0dland trade and have been buying issues one at a time ever since).

I was thinking about this at lunchtime today, actually. I’ve decided to shoot for the holy grail of a complete ROM Spaceknight run, and I was wondering to myself whether it was worth checking out the local comic shops at all, or if it would be better to stick to the dusty old second-hand bookstores.

It’s all stuff that I wasn’t prepared to follow monthly (I thought it would read better in chunks) and was certainly not prepared to pay hardcover price for. I bide my time and search the local shops. It’s actually kind of brought back that old feeling I had when I was a kid and trying to hunt stuff down.

I have a “want list” of stuff I’m seeking, and the vast majority of it is stuff that will never be traded for whatever reason, but that I desperately want to read–Casey’s Automatic Kafka, the aforementioned Young Heroes In Love, and so forth. I also have a lifelong “ambition” (in quotes because, well, it doesn’t really deserve the word) to collect complete runs of the Batman books; that’s my fanboy blindspot, and I’m sticking to it.

What’s intriguing about this question is that I only have time and resources to do true back issue hunting a couple times a year, it’s still the activity that makes me feel MOST like a “comics fan.” Reading a trade or an issue on the couch, opening the shipping box from HeavyInk, browsing a shop with no back issues–I love it all, but nothing gets my geek going like a 3/$1.00 sign, or a sidewalk sale with quarter bins, or a convention floor full of unexplored long boxes.