Sure, you've seen our fancy newsletter, and our game room page, and our forums, etc. (In fact, you can go back to our main page and look at them all some more with this link.) So, you're probably wondering,

To which I would reply, "Woah, reign in the huge handwritten-font-using image! You can talk in a normal font, friend!" Then, I would further elaborate by adding, "Well, we will buy old comic books, among other things, we have a subscription service for comics, and we can special order all kinds of gaming and comic products." Perhaps this will elicit more questions, like, say,

Well, I appreciate you toning down the font size on that image there, and that's a nice gradient effect, if not entirely necessary! Anyway, as a comic shop, we primarily buy Silver and Bronze Age Superhero Comic Books. Of course, that's not really a description that does a lot to help people who don't necessarily know a lot about comic books. At Fanboy, the cutoff date for the books we buy is 1977. Of course, many comics don't have a date of publication on them, just an issue number. The date of publication on older comics isn't too hard to find, it's just really, really tiny. Take, for example, this issue of Tomb of Dracula:

Well, while that cover is filled with information about Dracula (he's the Lord of the Vampires), his fears (some gold guy with white hair), who he is incapable of stopping (the aforementioned gold guy), and the comic's rank among "Fear Magazines" (first), it doesn't give us a lot of information about what year the book was published. Sure, there's an issue number and a month of publication, but no indication of what year the book was published. It looks pretty old, but was it published before 1977? Well, here's how to definitively figure out what year your older comic books were published. Open up to the first page:

See that tiny, tiny fine print at the bottom of the page? Well, you'll need to read that. Here's a close-up of this particular book's copyright text:

The copyright year is usually the date of publication. So, in this case, the comic was published in 1976, putting it a year before our general 1977 cut-off date! It would certainly be something we would be interested in looking at. Of course, if you have a box of a hundred comics, the prospect of looking through each and every one of them to try to find the legal text is a chore. Sometimes it's in a different part of the book, too, making the whole task even harder. Well, as a time-saver, here's a handy rule of thumb for approximating the time period during which the book was published: if the cover price is 35¢ or less, then it was probably published before 1977.

Oh, one other thing to add: if you have an Overstreet Comics Price Guide, and you just can't seem to find the title you have in the book, look for that legal text. Usually, the first sentence will be the title printed in all caps--in the case of this book, TOMB OF DRACULA. While that one won't be hard to find, there are some really deceptive issues out there. For example, there are some issues of Detective Comics that have Batman's name bigger than the words Detective Comics, but they aren't listed under "Batman" in the Overstreet Guide, but if you take a look at that legal text, you'll see that the official title is listed as DETECTIVE COMICS.

That's the quick guide to the comics stuff we pick up, which is the most common item people bring by. However, we also pick up other things:

We only buy rare singles for Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. There's one easy way to figure out Magic rarity that I know of. For later expansions, the expansion symbol on the right in the middle of the card where it says the card type will be a different color depending on rarity. Commons have a black and white expansion symbol, uncommons have a silver expansion symbol, and rares have a gold expansion symbol. We also only buy rares that are currently legal in Standard (or Type II) Tournaments. That means they have to have been printed in either the latest core set (for example: 8th Edition, 9th Edition, 10th Edition, etc.) or one of the two most recent blocks. Blocks are sets of three themed expansions; the Kamigawa Block consisted of the sets Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, and Saviors of Kamigawa; the Time Spiral Block consisted of Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight; and so on and so forth. So, when Tenth Edition was released, the Standard Tournament Format included cards printed in Tenth Edition, the Time Spiral Block, and the Ravnica Block.

This doesn't mean we won't buy card from older sets; some cards are reprinted in later core sets. For example, Birds of Paradise has been reprinted several times, and all printings of those cards are legal when one printing is. The only good way I know of to see when cards were printed is by using the Gatherer card database. That can also help you figure out rarity of your older cards that weren't printed with colored expansion symbols.

Generally, for us to pick up a used trade paperback, it has to be one of two things: it needs to be in good condition, or it needs to be out of print--i.e., we can't just order it from our distributor. Otherwise, it doesn't really do us a lot of good to pick it up. If we have a trade paperback on the shelf, we probably don't want to buy a used copy of it. Like with the trade paperbacks, we generally want stuff that's out of print. We mainly buy Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, but we'll be willing to take a look at pretty much anything that's old or out of print, so if you've got a chance to stop by, it's worth a shot. Thomas buys a lot of old jazz and blues records for his personal collection. Records are like CDs, except black and older. Kind of like the blues musicians Thomas likes!

Well asked, friend! For the convenience of our customers, we have a subscription service free of charge. In fact, it's so free of charge that you get a discount for signing up! All we require is that you get a minimum of five (5) ongoing titles. Ongoing titles are comics scheduled to come out every month. For example, Amazing Spider-Man, Action Comics, and Spawn are all ongoing titles, while stuff like Civil War and Infinite Crisis are miniseries. This isn't to say that you can't subscribe to miniseries, it's just that they don't count towards your five minimum titles or for your discount.

Oh, right, the discounts! There are three levels of discount based on how many ongoing titles you get. We also count maxiseries for purposes of the discount, which are limited series consisting of 12 or more issues. Here are the discount levels and the number of ongoing series or maxiseries you have to get to achieve them:

Number of Titles	Discount	Cap
5-10	6%	$40.00
11-20	10%	$50.00
21+	15%	$75.00

Well, since I put it in the table, I might as well explain the cap. Since we don't require a deposit on subscriptions or anything, we need to make sure that you don't take off and stick us with like a ton of unsellable crap you asked us to pull for you. So, there's a dollar value cap on the amount of merchandise that can be in your subscription box. Once you go over the cap, we stop pulling books for you and give you a call, letting you know you have 30 days to get your subsciption box back under the cap limit. If your box is still on hold 30 days later, then we cancel your subscription--and the next time you sign up for a box, we'll require a $50.00 deposit. Yeah, it kind of sucks, but if you keep in touch with us, we're willing to work with you. We understand if you're going to be out of town for a few months, or something like that--as long as you keep us up to date on what's going on, we're surprisingly understanding!

That's the basics of our subscription service. There are more details, but they're on our subscription form which you can download here in .pdf format. If you want, you can even print out your own copy of the form to fill out and bring in--just don't worry about filling in your box number or discount level. We'll take care of that.

We can special order most comics and gaming items if we don't have them in stock. As long as the items are available at our distributor, we can get them for you. There are a few procedural things for how we do special orders:

First up, we need you to come in and place the order in person. If the item is something we don't normally stock, we'll probably require a 50% deposit down on the item, but you can pay for the item in full once you get it. We'll fill out a special order card for you, which will look something like this:

Most of the information to be filled out there is for store use--all we need from you is the name of the item you're special ordering, your name, and a phone number at which you can be reached. After that, we take care of the rest.

Of course, once you've ordered your item, when can you expect it? Well, we do weekly orders at Fanboy. Gaming orders are made every Monday morning, and comic orders are made every Tuesday morning. So, once you order from us, the order will be placed on the following Monday or Tuesday, depending on what you ordered. Gaming products usually arrive on Wednesday and Thursday and comic books and related products usually arrive on Thursday or Friday, depending on when the order is processed. So, if you order a trade paperback on Friday, you can expect it to come in on the next Friday, at the latest. If you order a board game on Monday after we've placed our gaming order, we won't be able to order it until the next coming Monday, and it will come in on Wednesday or Thursday that week.

We're also willing to ship out special orders of $25.00 or more, if you're going to be out of town when the product comes in or whatever. Shipping varies, but we can give you a total when you place the order. We do our shipping every Tuesday, so it'll probably be a week or so between when we place the order and when it's actually shipped out.

We also do advanced special orders for products offered in the Previews Catalogue, which is filled with solicitations for products that will be coming out generally two months after the Previews in which they're solicited. These generally follow the same guidelines as regular special orders, but it could be several months before we actually receive the product at the store. Keep an eye on the shipping updates in the newsletter to see if a product you've ordered has been pushed back or anything like that.