Episode 18: My Comics Collection is a Mess
I suppose if I had a neat and tidy collection, I’d think about it less.
I have to be honest. My comics collection is a mess and I don’t like it anymore.
I love my comics. I love having all these comics. I hate the fact that there are so many of them that I have to keep them in so many different places. I don’t have that Basement Man Cave with wall-to-wall bookshelves and DrawerBoxes or anything like that. I have two or three closets, some space in the garage and, yes, some space at my mother’s house.
I’d love to cut the collection by a half.
Sometimes, as a thought exercise, I’ll open up a longbox and ask myself which half of those comics I’d get rid of.
Every time, the dream dies. I can’t decide. I have valid reasons for saving everything. And when those aren’t valid, I tell myself I should keep them for the sake of comics journalism. You never know when one of those books might come in handy for a column or research for an article or something.
That happens rarely, but it happens enough to make them useful. You can’t just throw out useful stuff, can you?
I suppose if suddenly I found myself unemployed, had to downscale my life, and didn’t have enough room in my new affordable one bedroom apartment that I could, with my back to my wall, get rid of this stuff.
But, right now? That’s impossible. I’m a weak man. A weak, weak man.
With far too many comics.
And the more you get rid of, the harder it is to get rid of more. It’s not one of those things where once the dam bursts open, you have an easier time getting rid of things. No, you, if only subconsciously, assign a value to all your comics. The ones with lower values are easy to get rid of. After that, all that’s left are higher value items, and who’d want to get rid of those?
I did a major purge a few years back and sold thousands of comics and a thousand trades and hardcovers to a local dealer. Those were the “easy to get rid of books”. They’re gone. All the rest that are left I have some form of attachment to.
Really, what I want most of all is a lot of bookshelves to organize the OGNs and collected editions and European reprints better. Haven’t talked my wife into that yet.
I do have a few boxes of books that I can put up on eBay to get rid of. I do that from time to time and, very slowly, they’ll sell. Three trades here, five trades there. I make little money on those, but it’s enough to keep the PayPal account funded towards Comixology/Izneo purchases or some software packages. (I have a font addiction that serves no real purpose….)
Even if I sold all of those trades tomorrow, though, it wouldn’t make a dent.
Comics collections. They’re great things, and the most annoying things all at once.
One of these days it’ll be manageable. How to organize it? That’s a show for another day…
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Hehe welcome to the club 😀 I’ve had the same problem for the past ten years when I sold my house in France to move to Bruxelles for work. I put the whole thing in storage and over the course of a few years managed to sell (slowly and for relatively little money) about half of my 400 boxes. The other half is still in storage and I’ve decided to keep selling individual issues to focus on collected editions. I’m also getting rid of all collectibles that are not made of paper, like statues, figurines, etc. That should relieve me of another 100 boses if all goes well, I’m hiring my 16 year-old nephew to do the legwork of managing the ebay transactions (or the french equivalent of it, named LeBonCoin.fr). As for the rest, that’s still about 100 boxes, I solved the problem a different way, I’m buying a new house and moving again 😉
So, the answer is to buy a bigger house? I can get behind that, though I’m not sure any mortgage company would want me to. I’m grateful I never got into the statues and figures and whatnot. I think I own two small statues, and that’s more than enough. I’ve found that paying every month for storage will test just how much you treasure comics.;-) Keep that nephew busy! Teach him all about making money, one Euro at a time!
I think I’m the odd person out in that I buy and sell quickly if a book or series doesn’t “wow” me immediately. In part because I live in a small apartment and just can’t fit boxes and boxes of comics. If I buy a trade paperback and it doesn’t doesn’t grab me enough to keep going, I’ll sell it right away to a used bookstore or give it away to the public library. If I’ve read an entire series and know I won’t be reading it again, I’ll sell it or give it to a friend or colleague to enjoy. It’s just a reality given the space I have to store books.
The huge exception are my European comic albums. I keep them all. Part of that is that I buy these much more intentionally and know that almost all of them are “keepers”. Part of it is that these albums are not reprinted very often — especially those I have to buy in Danish translations. Unlike US comics I won’t be able to buy them again if I later change my mind.
You’re just the man I wish I could be. I’ve definitely gotten better about it, but I’m nowhere near as strict with myself as I should be. Like you, though, I’ve learned to be more deliberate with my purchases when it comes to the collected editions and albums. Those are less likely to go away just because they’re a more “curated” part of my collection. They’re often my favorite books. The one thing that’s made it easier to get rid of a lot of my comics has been the knowledge that I can always rebuy them as digital comics. The material isn’t lost. It’ll just be transformed in case of an emergency.
I’m lucky as I have a nerd cave – a small room built onto the back of our garage (there when we moved in, I’d never dare suggest building one just for my nerd collection, but even so I’m pretty good at shifting stuff on… kinda.
I’m made a promise to myself that my collection would not spill outside the shelf space I have in there. Sure I squeeze stuff in but some stuff has to go. I have a simple rule. When I re-read something – and I’m pretty good at making my reading list (well its a spreadsheet these days and yes things on there can take up to 3 plus years to get to the top of the list) half re-read as well as the new stuff I aquire. When I do re-read something, or if I just stumble across something on those rare, lovely occasions when I get to visit my nerd cave for an hour or two – and know I’m unlikely to re-read soething, for whatever reason, it goes into a for sale section… or as it is at the moment a pile of comic boxes in a corner.
This means some stuff that I really like, or is pretty good is destined to go… at some point. So for example I have a complete set of stories from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run. Now these are not all the original comics, there a hardcover of the first 8 or so issues, some Essential Vertigo reprints and then most of the originals from issue 40 or so onwards. They are great comics, its a great story… will I re-read them… unlikely.
Fuss monkey that I am it bugs me that they are scattered in so many formats and editions. When I re-read the run – which is slowly creeping up my read / re-read spreadsheet, I’ll wait for the inevitable comixology sale and buy them digitally so they are at least all presented uniformly. Similarly my complete run of Spidey Essential editions can go, If I ever get around to a read there I’m pick what I want from a digital sale. Or last time I re-read my Avengers collection – which was pretty large I enjoyed it, alot, but it was clear I wasn’t going to read it again (well aside from the Stern, Buscema and Palmer stuff of course). So a labour of love, collected over a number of years back in the 2000s, was shifted to the sale pile. Similarly my complete set of Ka-Zar led comics over multiple series. Ectera ectera.
The problem is early this year when I hit a critical mass and decided that pile to sell really needed to start to reduce in size I couldn’t face returning to eBay as I’ve done in the past. So I decided the way to go was to hire a table at a local comic mart and shift them there. I did pretty well, certainly cleared my threshold for making it feel like an acceptable use of time. More importantly I really enjoyed the day. Selling stuff pretty cheap I drew good numbers to my table and spent a very pleasent day chatting to fellow nerds about comics. The kids popped in to help for a bit and they loved it to. So its clear that was the way to go….
…trouble is I’m a lazy old goat and so while the pile has been added to and I’ve done some of the work in preparation to shifting stuff I’ve not quite got around to booking a table again and somehow 4 of these comic marts have past me by without action. Start of 2020 I’m determined to get back on that bandwagon and go to another mart. After all the sell pile has got back up to the size – or more now I suspect – it was the first time round. Just need to get off my lazy ass and get them sold. Otherwise how will I justify buying those Swamp Thing comics digitally if I still own them physically!