You might think that my favorite place to buy back issues would be my local comic shop, or maybe haunting eBay or perhaps running to a comic book convention, want list in hand.

You’d be wrong.

One of my favorite places to find oddball comics is a thrift shop – you know the kind I mean, the ones with old clothes, chipped glassware and broken Betamaxes. The kind of thrift shop that’s usually run by the Goodwill or the Salvation Army or a local charity organization.

The DNA of antique dealers runs through my veins, straight from my maternal grandfather and on down to me. So as a kid, our family field trips were often to estate sales, drafty auction houses, flea markets and, of course thrift shops. My reward was that sometimes I’d find comics. I once won a box lot of 50 or so good-condition Silver Age DC’s for $10.00, so the rewards were often very nice.

When you’re poking through a thrift shop the condition of whatever comics you find might be too worn for a comic book store to bother with, and a lot of them may be multiple copies of Darker Image #1, but that only makes finding the nugget of gold all the sweeter.

And that “nugget of gold” is something that can make my year. I was in one recently in my hometown and I found a comic tucked way in the back on an old-school magazine rack.

It was Groo The Wanderer #4 (September 1983), one of the Pacific Comics issues, by Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragonés. This is the one with the Frank Frazetta parody cover (see scan).

Considering its age and the rather haphazard way it was racked, it was still in very good condition. I flipped it open, the staples were still in place and all the pages were intact. It was then that I discovered that on the first page it was not only signed by Sergio, but he’d drawn a little cartoon as well (see second scan).

What could’ve happened in this person’s life to make them want to toss out a signed and sketched Sergio comic? I can only guess that someone – Mother? Ex-wife? Ex-husband? - tossed it when the owner wasn’t looking or maybe the owner had died and their personal effects got tossed. How else could you explain it?

I grabbed that comic like it was a fresh Krispy Kreme donut rolling down aisle 2500 at Comic Con International and did not let go while I searched the rest of the store for anything remotely similar. Nothing caught my eye. This would be my sole treat, but it was more than enough.

Cost for the comic? It was considered a children’s book by the thrift shop staff and was thus priced at whopping 25¢. I couldn’t get the quarter out of my pocket fast enough.

And you know what else I discovered? It’s still a fun and entertaining comic.

[Artwork: Cover to Groo The Wanderer #4, from my personal collection. © Sergio Aragones (top); signature and sketch from the first page of the same comic (bottom)]