It is important to remember that beneath all the memorabilia and all the vendors at a convention, that beneath it all, the mediums exists there.  While fans of television and film flock to screenings of new movies or television episodes, comic fans are left either in artist alley or searching the back issue bins for a missing issue in a collection.  Surprisingly though, there is even a bit of a move away from this specific source at comic conventions, as it becomes less and less profitable for comic book stores to set up shop in a booth when their margins are not so high.  Not surprisingly therefore it can be a bit of a challenge to find comics at all.

At the previous comic book convention that I attended I got so exasperated in trying to find specific issues that I effectively gave up and tried to find a specific issue of a decades-old Kamandi comic.  It should be noted though that Fan Expo is quite a bit larger than the Toronto Comic Con, even though they are run by the same people, and so more vendors were on hand at Fan Expo 2015 than at Toronto Comic Con 2015.  With this in hand, I decided that I would search out three separate issues that I had been looking for.  The reasons for buying the covers were somewhat shallow, I had already read the issues themselves, and I was just looking for issues whose covers had stood out for me.  I thus decided on three issues, two from DC’s new 52, and one from Zenescope from a few years back.  Batgirl #26 stands out to me as one of the most beautiful covers that I have seen in recent years, and Wonder Woman #36 was of interest to me to see if the value had gone up at all as the beginning point in the series for the creative team of Meredith and David Finch.  Reaching a bit further back was the cover for Myths and Legends #1 from Zenescope, a J. Scott Campbell cover, that the company uses all the time in its own advertisements.

Here were my findings, booth by booth:

Booth #1

The first booth had two different setups.  Some of the more sought after recent issues were displayed on a table.  I found Wonder Woman #36 here right away, with several copies available – there were a lot, I didn’t bother to count – and all of them for $4.  Strangely enough, after checking the nearby back issue bins, I found the exact same issue for $3.99, effectively the same price, unless I was buying hundreds of them.  Still technically this ended up being the cheapest that I could find.  For Batgirl there were several nearby in the same sequence, but no #26, and there were no Grimm Fairy Tales at all.

Booth #2

I had no luck here at all.  They had the first issue of the new 52 run for Wonder Woman, but no recent Batgirl, and no Grimm Fairy Tales at all.

Booth #3

I had even less luck here.  For both Wonder Woman and Batgirl there were only older back issues, and again no Grimm Fairy Tales of any kind.

Booth #4

This one was better.  It had no Wonder Woman of the modern era, but it had three of Batgirl #26, all at $4, though none at all again for Grimm Fairy Tales.

Booth #5

A decent collection of Wonder Woman, though nothing new 52, and no Batgirl or Grimm Fairy Tales.

Booth #6

This booth had a few new 52 Wonder Woman issues, but no #36.  It did have two #26 of Batgirl, going for the standard price of $4.  This place also had the most interesting collection that I saw while browsing, the entire collection of Alien Worlds eight issues for about $40.

Booth #7

Something about saving the best for last?  Well not quite.  This booth had 3 of Wonder Woman #36, including the Lego variant ($4) and the blank variant ($7) as well as the regular for $4.  No Batgirl again, but this booth had by far the best selection of Grimm Fairy Tales, though not one of Myths and Legends #1.  I picked up another that caught my eye, a variant for Grimm Fairy Tales Presents Oz #5, though as this was the last booth, I gave up hope on finding the last issue and cover.

… but …

After a walk down artist alley I noticed the Zenescope booth for the first time, and there on a cover of a book about Zenescope art was the cover that I was looking for.  I flipped through it, but wasn’t really interested in it, especially after the previously unseen booth babe laid a hard sell on me, trying to get me to pay $130 for it.  I put it down and walked around the other side of the booth and found some single exclusives, in this case focused on J. Scott Campbell and Dawn McTeigue as they were nearby, and they admitted trying to push some of these as they were hoping people would buy them to get them. I finally found the cover as the alternte to Code Red #1 (Zenescope does re-use this