When I was eleven, I had a subscription to The Fantastic Four and that was pretty much the extent of my collecting. I got one new comic each month, and very, very occasionally a handful of others if Mom had a little extra pocket change and I was being really whiney at the grocery store. Between the two, let's call it 20 comics a year. Storing 20 comics is not a big deal. You could drop those as a stack on the kitchen table and it wouldn't cause too much of an issue.
After five years of that, though, you've now got 100 comics. It's not impossible to find room for 100 comics, but that's probably enough that if you tried just dropping them on the kitchen table, you wouldn't be able to just slide them to side a bit to have lunch. They could still pretty easily fit in a short box, but you're now starting to consider their space and size, and how much room they take up.
But hey, we added five years to an 11-year-old. That's a sixteen-year-old now. One who can drive and works part-time at McDonald's. That single title subscription is now six titles. And instead of begging Mom for pocket change, McDonald's allows for discretionary income, meaning more purchasing power and more regular trips to the comic shop. So instead of 20 comics per year, we're looking at maybe 100 comics per year. Under the original premise, it would've taken fifteen years to fill a single long-box. Now, it's down to three years. Three years to figure out where you're going to put another long-box isn't a terrible endeavor, but it's certainly more thought-consuming in terms of storage logistics than a single long-box over a decade-plus.
Where I'm going with this is that the more comics you buy, the more storing them becomes a concern. Because not only do you have to consider where you're going to put all these new comics you just got, but that's in addition to the ones from before that you were already storing! If this keeps happening throughout your life -- you keep buying comics -- you eventually start run up against the financial constraints of storing them. You've bought as many bookshelves as you can fit in your home, the books on the shelves are all two or three deep, plus there's two or three more books lying horizontally across the tops of everything else too. You're now essentially running up against three options...
- Create additional storage space in your home
- Rent a storage unit at another location
- Get rid of some of your collection
What I don't know, though, is which of those three methods might be more common than the others. When folks run out of space for their comics, how do most people handle that? I see some people selling their comics online, often with a distinct "I need to make more space" type of message, but I have no sense of how common that is against other options.
Please do me a favor, and in the comments, let me know if/when you found yourself running out of space to store your collection, and how you tackled it. One of the three options here, or maybe a combination? Or maybe something else entirely that I haven't thought of! I'm genuinely curious what might be more/less common.
6 comments:
I usually cull my collection every few years. I’m too cheap to pay for a storage unit, I like being able to easily browse my books, and I’m sensitive to unintentional clutter. I’ve found a comfortable number of comic boxes for my space, and my goal is to not exceed that.
When I notice those boxes are getting a bit tight, it’s time to reduce my collection. I look at this as an opportunity to have some fun browsing, and to look for books that I’ve soured on or, more commonly, books I _enjoyed reading_, but feel no particular emotional connection or memory attached to the _physical artifact_. I pull those out.
What happens next depends on the book. If it’s valuable enough (alone or in a set), I may sell it online. I’ll take other decent books to a local shop. Some I’ll give to interested friends or neighbors. Whatever’s left gets donated.
The process can feel a little painful at first, but I always feel better afterward. I’m currently in the midst of culling a little over 10% of my collection, and I think what remains represents my interests and tastes much better than it did before. And it’s so much more fun hunting for comics when you know you already have space for them.
I hold steady at 12 short boxes, so there's culling every year or so. I'm not really about comics as trophies other than a few signed; I tell myself they're all to read, but I'm hanging on to some for more sentimental reasons, some of those to keep the experience of the whole decaying comic for the ads and columns.
For a few years I taught comics at the local university, so culling was easy — I'd just bring in a pile, tell them nothing's leaving with me, and choose to believe they found good homes. Now, sometimes I just gift to the local freecycle group — they're always happy for it. LCS, for a little while, was buying collectibles, so I’m sitting on a few runs for when/if they start up again.
Trades, hoo boy, that's another story. Also because some of those floppies I purge? Yeah, replace in trades. Those are two deep, stacked sideways, piled around the house, etc. Though I just this weekend sold back around 20, some dating back decades. A cull there starts with a bunch of must-keep, a few that I can find myself letting go of, and a whole bunch in some middle ground where they just linger.
I like the intentionality of this approach. It's got a "does keeping this spark joy" kind of feel, but from a more practical perspective without the marketing woowoo vibes. :)
How many of the titles that you get as floppies do you replace with trades? What's your criteria for that kind of replacement (as opposed to just getting rid of the floppies)? The stories that you really like, or just everything from a specific title, or the stuff by a specific creator, or...?
Trades are for things I want to be able to just pull off the shelf and read; those 12 short boxes are all stacked on each other in a closet behind other boxes, so it’s a bit of a thing to read something on impulse.
So, favorite stories, creators, series. I’d say nowadays maybe 10–20% of floppies get replaced, but I’ve also gotten more intentional this past year in what format I buy. Trades are for things I know I’ll like, or impulse purchases of something that’d caught my eye. Floppies are now for experiments, trying out something weird that I don’t know much/anything about* -- a little jolt of the unexpected on a Friday night.
* TBF, still often major publishers and creators I’m at least familiar with.
I guess I'm lucky in that I have an unfinished basement with lots of space, so after nearly a lifetime of collecting (I'm 52 and got my first comic when I was 3) I haven't had to reduce my collection yet. I put them in plastic totes as that works better for a basement environment. I do need to go through and re-organize them, though, and there's a part of me that wants to reduce what I have at least by a little when I do that.
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