I’m dead now, don’t smoke read comics.
Okay, I’m not really dead (but if I were, this would be the scariest weblog post ever! OoooooOOOOOOoooooh, spooky!), but I was, I don’t know, in a morbid mood, I guess, and was thinking about what would happen to my collection of funnybooks after I kick the bucket.
I suppose it came to mind as I’ve recently been going through some of the old Comic Reader fanzines that I own. Some of them were subscription copies that were purchased (along with a sizable chunk of a comics collection) from an estate sale a few years back, and had the name and address of the decedent printed on the back covers. Every time I espy this gentleman’s name as I’m perusing decades-old comics news, I think about how he spent his spare time putting together a comics collection, only to have it split up and sold pretty much as soon as he passed on.
That’s a bit depressing, though I really can’t say that it’s unsurprising. After all, following my eventual death, I don’t expect that the vast Mikester Comic Archives will be sealed in high-grade industrial plastic and displayed as an eternal tribute to my greatness. But it would be nice…send enough PayPal donations to my e-mail address and I’ll get right on it.
I’ve no intention of having children, so most likely I won’t have any heirs to inherit my collection. Which is just as well, since more often than not geekiness tends to skip a generation, and any potential children of mine wouldn’t be interested in comics anyway. They’d probably be more into crazy, out-there things like “sports,” and “going out,” and “having social lives,” in total contrast to dear old Dad, and would probably sell my comics for just enough money to buy a tankful of fuel for their flying cars.
Selling is a tricky proposition as well…assuming I live to a ripe old age, there’s no assurance that there’ll still be a market for old comics after my passing. Or any kind of comics market at all. If we were to extrapolate from today’s society, kids of the future will most likely communicate only in grunts and only occasionally turn away from their vid-screens long enough to eat their food-pills, and thus wouldn’t be interested in “reading” anything printed on “paper.” That would be something only the old and the poor do, and thus any hobby based on paper products would likely have no economic support.
On the other hand, by that time there may not be any trees left, what with the last remaining old-growth forests having been replaced by vast fields of drilling machinery futilely attempting to extract that last milliliter of oil, and most books and magazines having been converted to building materials to house the 17 billion people living on Earth at that point, so paper might be a rare, valuable commodity. 100 Nu-Dollars per cubic ton of paper! Woo-hoo!
I suppose I could will them to a library or something, but having worked in a library, I know the average lifespan for a comic book once it’s on the shelves is about 46 seconds. Plus, there’s no telling if libraries will still be around at that point, since, given the progressing reduction of funds for our local libraries over the years, I think they’re open for approximately 3 hours a week now as it is.
Perhaps I could “take it with me,” as it were, and be buried Egyptian pharaoh style, surrounded by golden long comic boxes, in an underground tomb. Or have my body burned, Viking-style, on a giant pyre made from my collection.
But no, most likely, my collection will go the way of the fellow whose Comic Readers I own, pieced out and divided up among comic stores and comic collectors, with no idea that particular copy of Superman #202 came from my full run of Eighty-Page Giants, no idea that issue of Spider-Man was bought because it came out on my birthday, no idea that those Sugar & Spikes came from a run I was never able to complete.
Or maybe they’ll just all be recycled into other paper products. Or into food…”Soylent Green is made of comics!”
Anyway, that’s my depressing thought for the morning.
Have a nice day!
You can give the collection to me!