Toronto Comic Hunting Haul
I was in Toronto for a work/family related trip last week, and was tremendously glad to get to spend some time in the city's used bookstores and comic shops. I posted earlier about the items I was most excited to find—4 binders full of the Penthouse comic 'Oh, Wicked Wanda!'—and here's the rest of the, ultimately rather excessive, haul. Almost all of it from The Beguiling, which I've for years considered the best comic store in Canada or the US, both for its unparalleled selection of comics across genres and periods, and for its fair prices and kind staff (if you've other contenders, I'd love to hear them!). I hit the large BMV as well, where I found a bunch of cheap Spawn (not something I seek out, but I'll grab copies if they're a buck or two) and a Vortex title I'd never heard of, S'not for Kids.
Particularly excited here for the two issues of Dave Cooper's early Chronic Idiocy, for a few more issues of Chester Brown's classic Yummy Fur (only three issues to go), for the first two issues of Rich Tomasso's Black Phoenix (I like his cartooning a lot, but new issues are widly expensive—was glad to find these cheap), and the little stack of Fiona Smyth zines in the last photo.
I couldn't resist grabbing a stack of Eros Comix anthology titles, Blowjob, Dildo, Head, and Rear Entry from the Beguiling. By many accounts the Eros imprint kept Fantagraphics afloat in the 90s and early 2000s, and though they published some trashy pornographic work, some incredible cartoonists contributed to their anthologies or had solo titles—Ho Che Anderson, Colleen Coover, R. Crumb, Bob Fingerman, Molly Fleener, Grass Green, Gilbert Hernandez, Molly Kiely, Don Simpson, Frank Thorne, Bill Willingham, Wally Wood, etc. Their books are a weird part of comics history that I'm fascinated by, and I pick them up whenever I can find them for reasonable prices (many are pretty inflated on the secondary market these days).
Unfortunately The Beguiling had partially shut down their back-issue space in their basement to prepare for an upcoming convention the day before I visited, so I couldn't dig through the full extent of their indie and underground back issues; but given that I found far more than I was anticipating as is, that was probably for the best.
Curious what stands our to folks here—and very interested in recommendations, either for shops elsewhere which offer this kind of stock, for for interesting and underknown titles, based on what I picked up.