You and your old comics.
I can’t believe I forgot to change my little corner box image yesterday. Having an impending dentist visit in the morning causes things to slip my mind a bit, I guess. Well, that and old age.
A couple memories from my ’70s childhood:
- The neighbor girl whose house had a room where books were just tossed into a pile on the floor. Literally. They were apparently heavy readers — novels, digests, comics, anything — and when a book or magazine was finished, the door to that room was opened, the book was thrown in, the door was closed again. Occasionally I’d be allowed to borrow some books from the pile…it was huge, a sprawling wall-to-wall flattened haystack of books and mags, and one could dig through the strata seeking the treasures below.
I read a whole lot of Richie Rich and Archie digests in this fashion. The temptation was to keep the books, since I knew they would simply just be thown back into the room where they would stay until Social Services paid a visit, but I never did keep any. Wish I did now, though.
Oddly enough, that family was real protective of their books, given how they treated them. It took some doing to get them to let me borrow them in the first place.
- Finding, at a friend’s house, a large open-topped cardboard box filled to the brim with pre-superhero Marvel monster comics, kept outside at the side of the house. Alas, I didn’t find this box until after the big rains earlier that week.
Just felt like making you cringe with that.
One of the side effects of managing a comic shop is that, after a day of working with comic books, the last thing you want to do when you get home is put away your own funnybooks. As a result, I had about three months’ worth to file away in the vast Mikester Comic Archives on Monday.
In the stack to file…four issues of JSA Classifed, one issue of Ultimates 2. Three issues of Firestorm, one issue of Superman/Batman (though I’d give Jeph Loeb some slack for the lateness of that title, given his personal situations). One issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle, no issues of Sonic Distruptors.
Thank God Marvel has eased on on their every two-to-three weeks schedule, for the most part…at least on the very few titles I get.
Anyway, I got to thinking…how do you guys sort out your comics in your personal collections? In general, currently running titles/companies in my collection are kept in a series of easily-accessable short boxes (i.e. my Flash boxes, or my Fantagraphics boxes). Some currently-running Marvel and DC series that don’t require their own boxes are in “Current Marvel Misc.” and “Current DC Misc.” boxes.
Completed series (either by design or by cancellation) are, in general kept in a series of long boxes.
I keep saying “in general” since there are some exceptions to this organization…my short boxes of Dell/Gold Key books are on the shelves next to the new books, and I have a long box of Disney books, to which I still add on a regular basis, with the older, completed collections. Ah, well, so long as I know where they’re at.
In short, the comics are organized, in both sections, by company first, then by title within each company. I keep meaning to put actual labels on the front of the boxes, but small pencilled notations are good enough for now.
And then there are the magazine boxes, and the fanzine boxes, and the giant Swamp Thing shrine with candles and silk curtains…but they’re all in some kind of reasonable order.
I’m assuming that most of you folks reading this site, having an interest in comics, probably have a stock of comics sorted away in a comparable fashion, and not just tossing them out as soon as you’re done, or keeping them all in shoeboxes or copy-paper boxes or ammo cases (all of which I’ve seen done).
So, how do you do it? Alphabetically in short boxes? On shelves? Just tossed into whatever box that happens to have some empty space? Do you bag everything? Do you board everything? Does everything go into a Mylar sleeve? Basically, are you as anal-retentive as I am? Are you more so, God help you?
Just curious, is all. Leave a comment if you’d like. No salesman will call.
