Comic time

It’s been a long time since I really collected comics, you know, every week, bagged, boarded, catalogued and boxed. I get comics every now and again but in no way could you consider it collecting. One thing I remember about comics though was how there was a strange parallel time defined by the printing of comics. Since they came out monthly you only had 12 issues of a comic each year. It isn’t a ton of story and in long running comics when you thought about what had happened it seemed very recent - as though not much time had passed, when in fact years of your life had gone by.

It was most clear when you started collecting a comic at number 1 and then one day you’d put down issue 42 and be like, wow, I was a whole different person 3 and a half years ago when I started reading this series. I remember very distinctly the first comic I ever bought - G.I.Joe #1 that I collected forever. I remember it being strange to look back at it.

I recall that after awhile my comics would get a bit out of order, I’d run out of room in my boxes or I’d come up with a new cataloguing system and I’d bust everything down to the basement and pile everything up by title pretty much across the whole floor. I’d carefully catalogue everything and make new dividers and then move them back into the boxes in nice alphabetical order. Of course I needed to leave about a third or so of each box empty to make room for new comics, so I didn’t have to reshuffle things around for awhile.

Now all that remains of the 13 long boxes of comics I had have had some series picked out and some key issues saved, but 99% of them were sold off more or less by weight. For a packrat like me, it’s a more than a little sad.

May 3rd, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: comics