Cheap At Twice The Price

As a comic art dealer I would occasionally buy entire collections, sometimes hundreds of pieces at a time. There would usually be a few pages that weren’t the most desirable to collectors: not having main characters, be drawn by a less than stellar artist, that sort of thing. Eventually I had a fair sized stack of these, my own little Island of Misfit Art that never got put out for sale at any of the shows. So, as a goof, I started taking a few of these pages to conventions and mixing them into the stacks of art that weren’t in display portfolios. On the back of these, where I’d normally write the price in pencil, I’d scribble “FREE” on them. From time to time someone would happily come up to me and claim their “purchase.”

Once, during a slow stretch at a convention, I noticed a guy looking through a pile of art. He was very deliberate as he scanned over each page and then turned them over to check the price. Bored, I watched for a few minutes until he got to the free page. He picked it up and gave it the once over. Then, like all the others, he looked at the back of the page for the damage. He stopped for a minute...and then he put it back in the pile and continued on with his meticulous inspection. Guess he just thought it was overpriced…