Flea Markets are the Real Superheroes

One of the great thrills of my childhood was going to the Flea Market in Princeton, WI during Saturdays throughout the summer.  My grandparents have a cabin in nearby Wautoma and when we’d go up there for a weekend or longer, my brother and I couldn’t wait to seek out the treasures amongst what others would call garbage in Princeton.  My brother was on the hunt for baseball cards, I was looking for comic books.  Surely, Dame Fortune would smile upon us on each Saturday!

There was always a comic book guy there, with longboxes chock full to salivate over.  Thumbing through multi-colored, superhero laden wonders was my stock in trade.  Looking for first issues of a series or for first appearances of characters or for titles that I knew would always be a good time like Marvel Team-Up or Justice League of America or random issues of Batman.  And then having spent 10 or so dollars on a stack of books, with perhaps an ancient MAD magazine from 1976 in tow that I had stumbled upon, I’d spend the rest of the weekend reading everything, ignoring everybody, emerging only to have some pizza from Milty Wilty Drive-In.  It was sheer bliss.

I collected comics for quite some time.  From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s and then again from 2006 through 2012ish.  I had 15-20 longboxes filled with issues.  I treasured these but realized that collecting 12 to 15 series at a time at $3-4 a pop each month back then was unsustainable.  Well, unsustainable if I also wanted to provide food and heat for my wife and family. 

Now take that combined with the tendency for certain comic series constantly rebooting for the sake of boosting sales or worse: getting all message-y, bludgeoning the reader with ham-fisted virtue signaling at the expense of effective, thought-provoking storytelling, I realized I was paying for stuff I didn’t enjoy.  I was collecting just to collect and that’s a dangerous slope to slip on.  Just ask anyone who is looking for the largest harem in the world.  Sure, it sounds amazing, but then reality slams down faster than overloaded elevator at a William Conrad impersonators convention.  (Look that one up kids; it’s a good reference!)

So I stopped cold turkey.  (Say, that would be a great comic character.  “In issue #4, Cold Turkey must stop the menace of The Gravy Train!”)  I sold off most everything at what turned out to be pennies on the dollar at best.  I kept some issues and trade paperbacks since I still liked reading and re-reading them, even if I didn’t go for regular monthly collecting anymore.  Nowadays, comics have priced themselves out of the market, after all, I still need to ensure that my children have newer Kleenex boxes for shoes.  Comic books have also increased in the likelihood of being the home of dreadful and fun-crushing mouthpieces of activist creators, more interested in sending a message than providing a good story.  But I digress and I wish they would too.

But how does that bring me up to today?  Exactly what is the point of all my unending prattle, as Dr. Doom would have lovingly told Ben Grimm to cease making? 

My children have now embraced the idea of going to the Princeton Flea Market.  Yes, there’s a new generation that is looking for treasure amongst the trash.  It’s gotten to the point where we hit it up when it opens in the cold days of April and go until in closes in the cold days of October.  In fact, we were just there last weekend since it was a lovely day in Wisconsin at 65 degrees and sunny.  (It was so nice out that I almost thought about considering to contemplate taking my windshield scraper out of the car for the summer.  But thankfully my common sense got the best of me, and I kept it in the car because well, you never know.)

As we wandered and wondered and did both at the same time at the flea market, my daughter was looking for books, my elder son was looking for a plush toy, and my younger son was looking for Transformers.  My wife just loved being outside on a lovely day, and I had no real agenda other than getting a lovely bratwurst for my efforts.  (There’s just something about a beautifully grilled brat for breakfast that makes me happy to live in the Dairyland.) 

My children all found success with their individual object hunts!  Plus, everything was delightfully cheap to purchase.  Then I saw an amazing sight.  The comic book guy from my youth had set up his tables at the Princeton Flea Market!  I’ve been coming here on-off for the past 40 years and sure enough, there he was.  With comics.  What unbelievable luck!

I was immediately transported back to being 10 years old, going through a longbox of comics all over again.  And I found four titles that were remarkably unremarkable.  No incredible values, no first character appearances, no first issues, no rarity, no remarkable reason to snap up.  That’s what I loved back in the day when I would originally get comics at the grocery store or drug store or at flea markets.  My criteria were simple: Were there characters I liked in a premise that sounded neat with a cover that drew me in?

The four titles I picked fit the bill.  Two issues from Marvel and two from DC, all from 1978-1984.  These books were written and drawn by workhorses in the industry.  Sure, they aren’t necessarily huge or flashy names, but they certainly are reliable people doing solid work with familiar characters.  Jim Starlin, Denny O’Neil, Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Roy Thomas, Alex Saviuk, Barry Windsor-Smith, and David Mazzucchelli to name a few. 

The best part?  Turns out that I was going through the 4 for $1 longbox.  That meant that all this comic entertainment came to exactly one dollar.  I didn’t care about collectability since none of these books, even in primo, mint, hot-off-the-presses condition could elicit more than $3-4 tops.  No sales friendly faces like Batman or X-Men or Spider-Man within the pages, save for maybe a delightful random Hostess ad where apparently Wolverine is dispatched to thwart a jewel robbery with a glazed cherry fruit pie.

Instead, here’s Superman and The Spectre and Daredevil and Black Widow and a certain number of pages to get a one and done story in and out.  No idealogue creator unsubtly spouting off their limited world view to alienate the audience.  No expensive multi-issue crossovers that lead to an ultimately unfulfilling and bloated storyline.  No three pages of story among 19 pages of incessant ads for products I will not even contemplate purchasing.  And I paid even less than the original 40+ year old cover price for each of these?  You bet I did!

So here’s to all the unsung comic book creators!  Here’s to all the new and veteran vendors at the flea market!  Here’s to all the girls I’ve loved before!  And here’s to Princeton, WI for keeping the dream alive through spectacular bratwurst!