Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Heroes Aren't Hard to Find: Charlotte Mini-Con 2018 Haul (part 1)



Last Saturday (01/28/18), I made the trip to uptown Charlotte, NC to my old college campus of CPCC at the Grady Cole Center. The best comic shop I've ever had the pleasure of shopping at, Heroes Aren't Hard to Find, organizes the Charlotte Mini-Con each January along with the much larger HeroesCon during the summer. It's been awhile since I've been able to attend a comic book show, so I was glad to have made time in my schedule to attend (i.e. - my wife was gracious enough to let me attend!). 

Part of the fun of this event and others is that I get to spend some one-on-one time with my brother. Comics are something that we both enjoy so it's cool to get to share that with him. He is the one afterall that is responsible for getting me hooked on all of these colorful, costumed super heroes. While my reading and collecting comics has come and gone as I've grown up and started a family, my love for the characters has never ceased. I'm predominately a Marvel fan (again, thanks to my brother) and I enjoy most of Marvel's books from the Bronze age. 


In fact, when I go to shows and conventions I rarely look at the "wall books" and sniff out the $.50 boxes. That's were I generally plant myself, though as I'm getting older I start to feel the aches and pains in my body towards the end of the day / the next day after sitting on the floor, leaning over going through so many boxes!

On this trip to the Charlotte Mini-Con, I was able to find several tables that had great deals. I pulled out my phone and fired up the CLZ comic app and I started to dig to see what I could find. For starters I'll share the books I was able to find of one of my favorite characters, Spider-Man.







While my collection of Amazing Spider-Man is meager when compared to many other collector's, it remains one of my favorite titles to search out and try to fill in the holes. It's getting harder and harder to find AMS in cheap boxes so at some point in the near future I may have to set my sights on $1 boxes. *gasp!*


Only found one book I needed from the regular Spider-Man title, issue #51. This one has a foil cover and is a flip book. I found a small chip on the edge of the foil and almost put it back, but it was cheap, filled a hole so why not?












I remember when Web of Spider-Man #1 came out. I remember seeing it on the shelves at Heroes in Charlotte...however back then I wasn't reading comics. Of course by the time I "discovered" Spider-Man, most of his titles, including Web were already well along in their numbering. I've only recently started to buy issues of Web of Spider-Man so I was thrilled to find such a large run...especially for cheap!


At the time of this post, I'm still behind on reading my new books. I'm currently about half way through Civil War II, but before that I completed the Secret Wars mini series. While it wasn't my favorite Marvel event story, one thing that did come out of Secret Wars that I enjoyed was the Amazing Spider-Man Renew Your Vows storyline. 

While I'm not a huge advocate of reversing the One More Day events, I did like reading a married Peter Parker. Toss in his daughter and super-powers and it makes for some fun stories, at least in my opinion. While I bought the Renew Your Vows mini-series, I didn't pick up the series when it became an ongoing series. I kinda regret that and I've been hoping to find back issues at an affordable price. While I only found the first two issues last weekend, I'm glad to have found them and I'm eagerly awaiting to read them.



One of the first Spider-Man stories I read was the now famous (or infamous?) clone story in Amazing Spider-Man. I loved every minute of it and have enjoyed the subsequent stories that took place afterwards. When the Scarlet Spider was given his own series, I wasn't currently buying new books so I've been trying to piece this series together for awhile. I don't usually see this title in $.50 or $1 boxes that often so I was more than happy to gobble up 4 issues that I didn't have, including the last issue of the series, #25.


Anything Venom always seems to be in demand. I found this one lone book of his The Hunted mini-series and according to my CLZ app, I didn't have it. Now I do.

Those are just the Spider-Man related books that I picked up. I'm still working on part 2 where I'll show off the other books that I was able to find on the cheap end. Thanks for stopping by!

5 comments:

  1. Wow. Some of those covers are fantastic! Headed to my first comic book convention in a few weeks. Super excited.

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    1. What will you be looking for Fuji? I love looking through the cheap boxes because I can always find something and I don't mind trying new things. You'll see in my next post some of the books I bought on a whim because they were cheap.

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    2. I'm actually going there to help out my buddy. But if I can find some cheap Star Wars comic book for my classroom, I'll grab them. I'm also going to finally meet Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett), so that'll be exciting.

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  2. It's hard to believe that you were able to get all of these titles so cheaply! Even though I was never a huge Spider-Man fan, I really enjoyed the Web of Spider-Man series when I was a kid. The stories were fun, and the covers were more often than not, pretty great too. I've got a few comic book posts coming up in the near future, but I don't think, content wise, that they will be anywhere near is good as this one (as well as part 2) was.

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    1. Thanks Jon. I pride myself on not spending more than $2 an issue! I always start by searching the sales floor for the cheapest boxes, then work my way up depending on what I find (or don't) find. BTW, I'm following your own blog and put it on my read list.

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