Adventures in Toy Hunting!

Has it been a couple of weeks since I last posted a non-review?  I need to slow down some.  The reality is that I dedicate like one day a week to working on the blog, and it's been pretty hectic so I haven't had a chance to sit down and write.  Enough of the excuses, it's rambling time!

As much as I love where I live, there have been a few times over the twenty years that I've lived here where I've contemplated moving.  The reason?  Lack of a collector community.  Let me explain.  We have two comic shops now.  When I first arrived, comic shops were like 7-11's (something else we don't have here) - one on every corner.  Now my options are limited to a guy at a flea market, or the awesome comic shop that I actually frequent.  And by frequent, I mean I show up when my Transformers comics come in.  If I actually want to buy a vintage Transformer?  I'm out of luck.  Seriously out of luck.  Still, I do like to try to find what I can locally and as such, I struck out a few weeks ago and did some looking around at places I rarely go.

First, I went to the flea market, of which I'm not a fan.  It's always crowded, everyone is smoking, and the only wares for sale are knock off designer clothes and handbags.  At any rate, there is a guy there that you could charitably call a vintage toy dealer.  He's more like a guy that finds toys on the side of the street and sells them.  I've talked about this guy before, and for some reason, I decided to give him another shot.

Here's a nice shot of his stall.  He actually cleaned up and organized!  Yes, this mess is actually organized.  At least he doesn't have the rack of figures that are zip tied to the rack anymore.

Feeling brave, I actually spent about 30 minutes digging around the place to see what I could find, Transformer-wise.  What I found was the same headless Warpath that he had the last time I was there like 2 years ago.  Price?  $10.  On to other ventures.

About a week ago, I had to buy a new headset for the 360.  I generally prefer the wired headsets, but I have kids and they've already broken 3 headsets, so I decided to go wireless.  I didn't feel like going to a GameStop, so I decided to try out a used game store by my house called "Play and Call" or something like that.  What I saw when I walked in was pretty impressive.  They had vintage games and systems!  Dreamcast!  Nintendo 64!  Old Sega!  NES!  They also had cheap game accessories that I wouldn't put near my 360.  As I wondered around place, I realized that they had a second room.

In this second room were quite a few long boxes of comics.  A lot of the comics that they had were Marvel Transformer issues.  And a lot of early 1990's Image.  I mean a lot.  Like Darker Image?   They had it.  Same thing for a lot of Youngblood.  However, they did have a wall that had this:

They had a ton of 1990's Star Wars figures, which aren't pictured, but they had quite a bit of MISB M.A.S.K. and Go-Bots.  I don't know how well everything will show up in the above pic, since I took it with my phone, but there are some deluxe Go-Bots on the middle shelf.  The prices were a bit high for me, the deluxes were $50, when I think they should be around $30.  I didn't bother talking to the guy working there since he was pretty swamped, but if I were so inclined, I'm sure I could haggle the prices down. 

So that's what I have available to me if I want to shop locally for vintage toys.  A disgusting flea market stall or an overpriced video game shop.  I wonder if my wife would want to move to Singapore just so I can buy Transformers locally?  Whelp, guess it's time to stalk eBay and the forums again...