The 800 pound (comic book) gorilla in the room
I hate chaos. Disorganization actually makes me depressed, while a clean environment actually makes me feel like I can better function in the world.
Unfortunately, I am not just a collector, but also a pack rat and a hoarder.
What does this mean? It means I save everything. No kidding. Among the oddities in the basement are all the pickling jars and ice cream containers one can imagine. I have three boxes in the basement of Transformers printed material alone - no doubt useful for archives whenever I get around to actually making an archive. And I save the plastic shells of toys until the day they can be recycled (fortunately Loblaws is now taking the plastic bag returns so I can save them AND dump them, so here’s hoping the City of Ottawa does the same on hard plastic soon!) And my workshop is a collection of all kinds of parts and bits that I am just sure will be useful one day.
Now this doesn’t actually bother me. I frequently find uses for things years after I acquire them and am immensely pleased with the prospect of not wasting so much. It’s no coincidence that our garbage output is fairly minimal, due to a combination of holding back and recycling anything that moves.
And I have literally boxes of toys that have been acquired from this yard sale or that value village trek. The trouble is that it inevitably leads to disorganization because I can’t find a spot for something or things overtake a nice clean part of the house and need to be dealt with.
The ensuing chaos drives me crazy. Which brings me to comics.
Because of the toy obsession in the last few years, I’ve not really done everything I can with my continually-growing comic collection. And I’ve also failed to par it back. It means there are literally boxes of unread comics, either picked up at full price or from stores at discount. This is besides the three and a half full legal size filing cabinets that is suppose to represent the organized collection. They are competing for space with the toys and it is suffocating. So this weekend, I’ve tried to begin to thin the collection.
Now I’ve done this before, but it was mostly a Marvel purge. This is a DC purge, and for a DC boy, that’s a hard thing.
Given the difficulties I have actually getting rid of stuff (particularly when I don’t believe - like I do with 80% of my comics - that no one will love them), I’m making it easy for me. If I have to give the particular issue a second thought, it stays. No questions asked. So the full runs of Firestorm and Dr. Fate stay, as do the runs of early 1990s Batman and Detective Comics that I acquired every month from the Weymouth Drug Store and which made up the bulk of my early collection. But filler issues, issues that I’ve picked up because I wanted to catch them all as oppose to trying to get a particular storyline? Gone. Goodbye Justice League Quarterly, au revour to the mistake that was No Man’s Land (really now, how odious is it to take a massive seven series crossover, and then set up mini-series within the series that cross over all the other books, making it impossible to read?)
Having only done a surface purge - basically I went into the half size filing cabinet where I kept the recently purchased, but vintage comics that I would “get around to reading someday” five to ten years ago and pulled out handfuls - I’m now hitting the filing cabinets themselves and thinning. And yes, I’m still hanging onto more than I should (particularly given the fact that trades are so much more handy to hold onto). But progress is being made and a two foot pile of comics is already waiting to be surrendered.
This brings me to three unique challenges.
First, there is the matter of greater organization that needs to take place. The comics are literally everywhere. I’ve already decided to integrate all those loose, rainy day reading issues into the main collection to cut down on loose comic boxes. But there are more problems than that. It’s been a decade since I actually wrote down what I have. The last time I did a full-on collection review, I had one filing cabinet of comics. So the list is old, and going through each drawer and each comic lets me update a list of sorts. Good for insurance and for finding out where I actually have holes too but it takes time, precious time.
Second, a lot of the comics are in bags from the early nineties and the plastic bags are breaking down. It’s probably already too late for me to be replacing the plastic bags, but I figure if the issues are worth holding onto, they are worth the effort of re-bagging. So I am re-bagging the worst offenders and keeping track of where I need to go back later. Because I only have 400 bags available to me without returning to the store. (Like I said as well, I’m glad Loblaws is taking back plastic bags these days for recycling…)
Third, and this is a biggie, I am looking to reintegrate the collection. When I set up my very first spreadsheet list of comics in the late 1990s, I went overboard on detail - issue, sub-plot title, “condition”, price, value, etc.) The software couldn’t handle the amount of information, so, to get around this, I split the collection into DC and everything else. I did this for the software and in the collection itself and the divide has remained permanent. But it is a divide that doesn’t make sense so I’m going to try reintegrating everything.
So basically I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Hurray!
Last thought. What do I do with the purged comics? They have no real value - the comics in questions are mostly twenty-five cent fillers that you find at any convention. But I don’t want to hang on to them to sell. I want them gone and out of my head. I’d like some coin for them but I’d be happy if someone would take them for charity. I may break down and give them to the Book Market, an Ottawa store that sells used books, where comics go to die (because they are never in bags) and where you at least get a shiny nickle per book. That will hurt but it would be something. But I wonder if the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario would be interested in them…
I can’t wait to this with the toys later in the year. Sigh.
