I want quarter bins. NOW.

I want quarter bins. NOW.

Aug 25

Today I’m grumpy cause my neck hurts and I didn’t sleep well and everyone’s paining on my ass on a Friday morning at work. So I’m gonna bitch about something that’s been on my mind for a good long while–the disappearance of the quarter bin.

Dollar bins? What the fuck is the point?! A new comic costs THREE dollars. Do you wanks really believe that dusty and bent-up old issue of Marvel Team-Up, or issue 3 of some long-forgotten miniseries from 1997, commands an asking price of FOUR quarters?! For the price of THREE dollar comics, I can get a hot fresh new comic, in nice shape, that is pulse-poundingly contemporary. I can dive into a story that is actually HAPPENING by people that are actually still WORKING.

Face front, true believers: Quarter bins are the SHIT. These magical receptacles of old and unwanted comics have always held a hypnotic allure to me, to the point where I now judge a comic shop’s entire worth on the cheapness of their cheap old comics. There was a place in Gardena, California–Geoffrey’s Comics–every weekend, six or eight quarter bins out front. On Free Comic Book Day, they were DIME bins. AWESOME.

You retailers need a wake-up call on this. You got old inventory you don’t need anymore? QUARTER BIN that shit. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Don’t drop quarter bin shit in a dollar bin and hope you can get away with it. The only “back issues” worth more than a quarter are those released in the past two years, tops. I am willing to pay a buck–even a buck-fifty–for an issue of Batman that’s eight months old, or the first issue of a newer series that I just got hipped to.

Otherwise, this is an ingrained psychological gulf that I refuse to cross, and it pisses me off that youngsters are being trained otherwise. To me, a quarter is the perfect price tag for a crappy random back issue that will make me happy and empty out the back room of my local comics emporium. Anything higher is a fucking rip-off.