In my never ending search for old comic books and other popular culture paper collectibles I never paid much attention to outdoor flea markets and yard sales. Those venues seem to be good for people who collect regular antiques, coins, toys and so on but I rarely had much luck finding rare paper items at them. But every rule has an exception and for me that turned out to be the Hillsville Flea Market. Its officially known as the VFW Flea Market and Gun Show. It started in 1967 and takes place twice a year for four days each over the Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends. You wouldn’t think the little town of Hillsville, Virginia in the remote Blue Ridge Mountains could draw 750,000 flea market shoppers a year, but that’s what the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia says it drew for the year 2004. 

The Hillsville Flea Market’s own website said it expected to draw 500,000 for its 2012 Labor Day show. Strangely, I couldn’t find the Hillsville show on any internet sites that rank flea markets. A number of sites rank the Top 10 Flea Markets and none of them mention Hillsville. Some of these sites list the Brimfield, Massachusetts flea market as the largest outdoor flea market in the USA. The Brimfield website makes that same claim and says it gets 130,000 at each of its four day shows held three times a year. If true, Hillsville is the larger show.

I first heard of the Hillsville show in 1996 while visiting an antique show in my town of Virginia Beach held at the Pavillion Convention Center. An out of town vendor named Sue told me how important the show was for her every year. She said the Hillsville show was colossal, with hundreds of dealers and thousands of visitors. 

My sister lives in Mount Airy, North Carolina not far from Hillsville so I wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel room if I went to the show. So, I decided to check out Sue’s story at the Labor Day show in 1996. Sue wasn’t exaggerating. The entire town of Hillsville was one huge flea market. The local residents rent out their yards as parking lots. Hundreds of vendors line the main road through town and there are hundreds more vendors spread over God knows how many acres all around. The heart of the show is the VFW gun show inside a fenced compound which also holds some of the vendors with better merchandise. It was quite a spectacle.

Fortunately, I did have some luck. I met one paper dealer from South Carolina named T.J. Player. He had several Astounding Science Fiction pulp magazines from the 1930s in surprisingly nice condition, easily Fine+ / Very Fine. You don’t find fragile 1930s pulp magazines in nice shape to often, especially at a flea market instead of a more upscale paper collectibles show. I was able to buy them for less than $30.00 each with left me some room for a profit when I sold them. I bought a few more from him by mail order after the show. I sold these nice Astounding pulps a few at a time at the Tyson’s Corner comic shows in Northern Virginia and other collectible shows over the next several months. I sold the largest group, 15 of them, to a collector at a science fiction show in Salem, Virginia in October 1997. He was impressed with the high grade condition and was glad to get them.

T.J. also had some boxes of western comic books. Most of them were the usual Dell photo covers. I remember he had a Rawhide TV show photo cover with Clint Eastwood. But he also had several harder to find early 1960s Marvel westerns like Two Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt Outlaw and Gunsmoke Western. Surprisingly, the comics were in Fine+ / Very Fine condition and there were two copies of some of them. He had priced them by one of the comic price guides a few years earlier and hadn’t changed them to reflect any price appreciation since. He also gave me a 25% discount. So I bought most of the comics for $4 and $5 each. I remember thinking how rare it was to be able to buy high grade Marvel comics that cheap in these modern times with everybody knowing that old comics were “worth something.”

Encouraged by this piece of luck I decided to try Hillsville again in September 1997. I had been negotiating for the past few months with a lady near Nashville, Tennessee to buy her vintage paperback book science fiction collection. So I drove from my sister’s house in Mount Airy with my mother to Nashville and bought the lady’s collection which filled up most of my car. 

The next day I went to the Hillsville Flea Market with mom. We spent all day walking around and finding nothing so I figured Hillsville was a bust this year, but at least I got the paperbacks. But late in the day in one of the off road areas I was walking along and spotted a table filled with stacks of what looked like magazines to my right. I went over to check and it wasn’t magazines, it was comic books! There were about 800 comics, almost all Dell comics from the 1950s with 10 cent cover prices, and the condition was better than average with many being in Very Fine at least. The dealer, Ken Boyle, had them bagged and boarded with each comic priced according to a price guide. Of course he had no idea how to grade comics so the prices were mostly the Near Mint price. They were nice, but not that nice. But when he saw I was a serious buyer he got realistic in a hurry and agreed to sell them all for about $7 each. I didn’t have that much cash so mom wrote him a check which to my surprise, he accepted. Would you take a check for $5,600 from a stranger? I guess I looked like a solid citizen to him. I somehow managed to get all the comics in my already overpacked car and made the trip home to Virginia Beach later knowing I had made quite a score.

Back home I had lots of fun sorting through the comics and figuring out what I had. I didn’t know much Dell comic books since I had never collected them. Most of them were westerns. There were lots of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry photo covers. A customer I had met at the local Pembroke Mall shows in Virginia Beach was a Roy Rogers collector. I invited him over to my house and he bought about 20 comics at between $20 and $30 each without haggling over the price. He loved Roy Rogers and wasn’t going to fuss about buying them.

I was amused to see that Roy’s horse Trigger had its own comic book and so did Gene’s horse Champion. Roy’s wife Dale Evans had her own comic as well. Like Roy, her comics had photo covers. There were several Lone Ranger comics, mostly painted covers but a few of the more desirable photo covers. There were two copies of The Lone Ranger #112 from 1957 which was the first photo cover. It’s a dynamic looking red cover with the Lone Ranger rearing back on his horse Silver. I liked the Lone Ranger some as a kid so I kept one for myself and sold the other one on ebay for $35 in 2000. And yes, the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver had its own comic book. So did his “faithful Indian companion” Tonto. I guess in the 1950s everybody was crazy enough about westerns to allow the supporting characters to have their own comics. Some of the western titles I had were Buffalo Bill, Jr., Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, Rin Tin Tin, Rex Allen, Gabby Hayes, Red Ryder, Little Beaver and so on. There were also several Western Roundup issues which featured different western stars. Yes, folks were crazy about westerns in the 1950s. 

I sold most of these at the comic and collectible shows over the next few years and the leftovers on ebay when I quit setting up at the shows in 1999. I sold the biggest batch, 44 of them, to an older dealer named John who specialized in western comics at a Greensboro Super Flea show in June 1998 in North Carolina. That’s mostly who collect western comics, old men who were were kids in the 1950s. I didn’t give him a big discount but he bought them anyway for $600. He bought nearly every Western comic I had except for the Rex Allen comics. He said Rex Allen wasn’t a good seller and it was best to “leave him alone.”

Apparently one of the rarest titles was a DC comic The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog. They were pricey in the Overstreet Guide and I was bit surprised when veteran comic dealer Gene Carpenter bought two of them from me at the Tyson’s Corner comic show with only a 10% discount from me. Gene probably had a customer who would pay much more. There were also several Tarzan comics books. The earliest 1950s ones were Lex Barker painted covers and the later ones were Gordon Scott photo covers. The covers always featured whoever was playing Tarzan in the movies at the time.

There were also lots of Walt Disney cartoon character comics like Donald Duck and Silly Symphonies which I had no personal interest but they sold ok.

I was pleased to see a few Turok Son of Stone early issues in nice shape. I had collected Turok as a kid and had never seen most of these early issues. A new comic book grading company named CGC had recently started up and these Turoks were the only books I sent in to get graded. I sold them on ebay for a decent profit.

I made the best money from a small handful of DC superhero comics. There were a few 1950s Batman, Superman and World’s Finest that were in nice condition and I sold them all at the collector shows for pretty close to full Overstreet Guide.

Aside from The Lone Ranger #112 the only other comics I kept for myself were from a genre that I do collect, Atlas science fiction / fantasy comics. There were only two in the entire collection of 800 comics, Marvel Tales #147 and World Of Suspense #2. I thought it odd that the original owner who obviously liked respectable and wholesome western and Walt Disney comics would have these two more socially suspect Atlas fantasy books.

I went to Hillsville again a year or two later but I found nothing but a batch of early 1960s Tarzan paperback books with cover art by the science fiction artist Richard Powers. I had to pay $3 each which is way more than I usually pay for paperbacks but I wanted to buy something from keeping the show from being a total bust. On that trip or maybe one of the two earlier trips I found a guy who had been the president of the Buck Owens fan club. He was selling all his country & western music magazines and related stuff. I bought a few items but Hee Haw comic books and magazines aren’t much of a return on your investment. I was disgruntled at all the time and effort spent for little return so I didn’t return to Hillsville until 2011 when we had a family reunion at my sister’s house in Mount Airy. I spent all day searching and only found one lousy magazine. I did find a $100 bill laying on the ground so that offset some of the wasted time.

I got real lucky with the Dell western collection on the 1997 trip which was worth the time and effort for a dealer. The first trip in 1996 yielded the Marvel westerns for my collection but from a business stand point the Astounding pulps were only a marginal return on the time and expense. The two later trips were almost a total bust. So my general observation still holds true. Outdoor flea markets are very risky for paper dealers if you have to drive hundreds of miles to visit one. However as a collector, having good luck on two trips out of four is pretty good. If you’re not willing to spend time and money with a 50% chance of a return, you’re not really a serious collector. We collectors have it in our blood to take chances and go the extra mile to find what we want. The thrill of the hunt never really dies. So maybe one day the collector in me will outweigh my more cautious dealer instincts and I’ll take another dive into the giant, beckoning maw of the Hillsville Flea Market. Maybe next time I’ll find a collection with 800 Atlas sci-fi / fantasy comics with only two oddball Dell westerns mixed in.