You should see he size of that tape dispenser.

Yes, I’m going to answer another reader question, because it’s been a long day and I want to do something that’s a little less labor/thought intensive. “SLACKING OFF — that’s the ProgRuin promise!”

Anyhoo, Matthew Murray asks

“What are the worst ‘preserved’ comics you’ve ever seen in collections? Duct tape? Hot glue? Cereal boxes cut into backing boards?”

Hoo boy, the things I’ve seen. And smelled. But “smell” is more involved with damage, and you’re talking about comics where someone tried to “preserve” or repair or whatever. And I’ve seen some horrors.

One particularly awful thing I’ve seen is an original Amazing Spider-Man #1 — yes, the one from the ’60s — where at some point someone got some kind of wide piece of clear tape and applied it to the covers. And I mean it was wide enough that a single piece spanned the entire width of the book. Were we still able to sell it? Oh, sure, it sold (for how much, I can’t remember…this was long before the price on this book had skyrocketed post-some prominent auctions).

Another tricky situation was a 1940s Wonder Woman #1, where there was a curved black plastic strip taped to the spine as “protection.” Lots of dry browning tape just all over the left hand side of that otherwise okay-looking book. We did sell it, and the buyer later told us he was able to get that plastic strip pulled off, and the tape was just dry enough to be able to be peeled off without much trouble. Well, we sure as heck weren’t going to do that.

These are the two biggies that stick out in my mind. But I’ve seen the homemade “backing boards” cut from cardboard boxes (and yes, even cereral boxes) shoved into the Ziploc bags used to hold the comics. Or I’ve seen comics and boards in a bag, with the bag stapled shut through the small overhang of the board. Or I’ve seen comics in bags and with pinholes though the top center of the comic when these were displayed on a wall.

I’ve often railed against using tape to seal your comic bags…that flapping strip can easily catch on a cover, or eventually deteriorate, or sneak out at night and attack your pets, all kinds of problems. But I’ve seen bags with so much taple sealing the bags that it’s easier to cut the comic out of its overpackaging. Or the bags and tape have deteriorated and gone “gooey” that even handling them makes your hands a sticky mess, making it bit of a trick to rescue the comics and avoiding getting any of said “goo” on them.

When it comes to storing the books, putting them in a proper comic book box is probably the ideal. But so often I’ve had bulk comics stored in huge plastic tubs, which usually results in more than a few of them being warped or outright bend when the piles in the crate eventually fall over on each other. I’ve seen lots of regular cardboard boxes or shoeboxes or those cartons that held either loose paper or the dot-matrix type of printer paper with the punched holes at the sides, used for comic storage, but at least those mostly had square corners and flat surfaces. The plastic storage boxes had wide curved sides and uneven interior widths and whatnot, facilitating comic shifting.

There was that one collection of several long boxes, containing multiple copies of nearly every comic published by Marvel from the ’60s through the ’80s., All well and good, but none of the comics were in bags, and a small flood of water in the area where they were stored resulted in water damage across the bottom halves of every issue.

And of course, the collection of comics where someone used a holepunch on each spine so that the books could be kept in a three-ring binder. Oh, and these were Golden Age books, too.

Those are the ones that immediately come to mind. I’m sure I’ll be surprised by some new wildly-awful comic protection in short order.