Half-Price Books finds

Not exactly a thrift store find this week, I’ll admit. Where I live in Southwest Ohio is within a twenty mile radius of three Half-Price Books. Four times a year, HPB sends out these great coupons where, during a week of sales, you can get 20%, 30%, 40%, and on Sunday a whopping 50% off one purchase. It’s perhaps a bit gluttonous of me, but on those 50% Off Sundays, I hit all three stores and these are my finds.

Let’s get this out of the way, right off the bat: I’m a huge fan of Gilmore Girls, which I started watching in college. I had a friend/girlfriend/I’m still not sure what our relationship was and she… she was very into the show. We would stay in so she could catch new episodes and I ended up getting hooked. For some reason, I started buying the show on DVD somewhere around Season 3 or 4, then ended up getting great deals on Seasons 1 and 5. Season 2 was the numerical holdout although I suppose I’ll now have to make it my business to pick up S.6 and S.7. Season Two of Gilmore Girls introduces bad boy Jess to Star’s Hollow and I’m going to be honest… I’ve never been much of a Jess fan. As far as these things go, the soapier aspects of Rory Gilmore’s story lines have always been the least interesting aspect of Gilmore Girls to me. Your mileage may indeed vary.

Anyway, I picked that one up for like $7 bucks and some change. I wish there were more special features on these collections; most of the extras on these DVDs consist of clip packages of like, “Best Fights from Season Two” and I find that pretty uninteresting.

The Greatest Team-Up Stories Ever Told is a hardcover collection published by DC Comics in 1989; I was eight years old when I first saw this beauty at the Waldenbooks in the Newburgh Mall. DC had just published a bunch of these “Greatest Stories Ever Told” collections featuring Batman, Superman, and The Joker and I managed to get my paws on those as a kid… but I never got this one until today. It’s a good representation of DC’s superhero team-up history: among the stories collected here are Flash of Two Worlds from The Flash #123 (the first team-up between the Golden and Sliver Age Flashes), Crisis on Earth-One/Crisis on Earth-Two from Justice League #21 (the first team up of the JLA and JSA), and No Evil Shall Escape My Sight from Green Lantern #76 (the beginning of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ run with the GL/Green Arrow team-ups). There’s also some fun oddball stories like the time travel team-up between the Silver Age Superboy and Robin (time travel is involved) and The Greatest Green Lantern of All, a head-spinning take on the Superman mythos via the Green Lantern Corps. The book stops short at collecting anything post Crisis on Infinite Earths but that’s fine by me. I’m going to put this next to my Stacked Deck: The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told.

This was another $7 dollar purchase, or thereabouts

Finally, two GameBoy gets: Animaniacs, published by Konami in 1995 and The Flash, published by THQ in 1991. These two cartridges are fairly representative of licensed games in that one of them completely sucks and one of them is good, but with a whole lot of flaws. The good one is Animaniacs, which makes sense… Konami made some of the best licensed games out there like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cart and Contra. Based on one of my favorite cartoons of the Nineties, you play as Yakko, Wakko, and Dot through three stages. The games flaw is how slow the character sprites move through the levels; it’s fairly infuriating. However infuriating that aspect of the game is, it’s nowhere near as bad as The Flash, which is based on the short-lived live action series. It’s one of those games where you have to press Up to jump. That probably tells you all you need to know.