Like any fool with a comic book habit, I can't help checking out any pile of average looking comics when I see them in a second hand bookstore or thrift shop or anything like that. These piles are almost certainly going to full of worthless trash, usually in extremely dodgy condition, but sometimes - just sometimes - there is an absolute gem in there.
But I doubt that any great discovery will ever beat finding the very first issue of 2000ad #1, just sitting there on a shelf in the back room of a second hand shop in Christchurch. It's a shop that was one of many in that trade that vanished after the earthquakes that devastated that city earlier this decade, but while it still existed, they had had a copy of Prog One, just sitting there like it wasn't anything special.
Finding any issues from the first two years of the comic have been teeth-grindingly difficult in this part of the world, I've got an unblemished run from #96 to last week's #2148, but finding copies from that first couple of years in this part of the world is super hard, let alone something as big as the very first one. But there it was.
Even better, the bookstore owner only wanted a buck for it, a deal that was so astonishingly good that I'm amazed I kept a poker face, and got the deal of a lifetime. If I was a decent human being, I would have insisted on giving them something closer to what it was actually worth, but I'm definitely not a decent human being, because I just shut the fuck up and gave them one coin for the original Galaxy's Greatest Comic.
Even without the space sinner, it's still the best score I've ever found at a secondhand score, and it's unlikely to ever be beaten. Unless there is a copy of Detective Comics #27 lurking among all the Beanos at the thrift store around the corner....
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