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There are many Sunday mornings where I'm sorry that I missed Tom Spurgeon's Five For Friday calls for submissions and this week has to be one of the ones I would have really liked to participate in; Confessional.  This week, Tom asked "Make Five Confessions Related To Comics That Don't Necessarily Portray You In A Flattering Light."  And as usual, one of Tom's own 5 for Friday's jumped out at me:

"3. I frequently think of throwing all my comics away."

I know that there are people who think throwing away comics is close to a capital crime but a similar sentiment was echoes at least a couple of times in the other replies for 5 for Friday.  It's kind of odd because I've been thinking lately of throwing away a large chunk of my collection.  You see, I've been collecting comics pretty much non-stop for almost 35 years or so and, during all of that time, I've barely gotten rid of anything.  I still miss the days of being a kid, when a large part of my collection could fit into a grocery bag that I'd lug to a friend's house.  We'd stay up all night haggling and trading comics, getting rid of the stuff that just didn't do it for me and getting something new and great.  In a nostalgic way, I really miss that simpler time of collecting comics.

So anyway, I never had that period of not reading comics that so many people go through.  I never sold my collection to buy a guitar or an Atari 2600 (just to date me a bit) so I've got a large portion of every comic I've ever bought.  Sure, some stuff has been sold off on Ebay but I don't think it's been enough to really make any huge dent in my collection.  Also, it's probably been almost 20 years since my collection has been in any kind of comprehensive order.  Once I left for college and started up a "mini" collection (enough to fit into a dorm room,) my collection has never been a unified whole-- bagged, boarded and in complete alphabetical order.  And it's just become less and less of a priority; as my collection has grown, I felt less of a need or a want to actually try to organize it.  That in itself has been a pain when I've wanted to read a 20 issue run of something and can only find about 17 issues.  Those other 3 issues exist in a small area but are well hidden and elusive, camouflaged by so many other comic books.  Here are two looks at what my comic book collection looks like right now:

Photo2
 
Photo1

Even more scary is the fact that this is even after it's been straightened up a bit.  How do all of those people in Robot 6's Shelf Porn organize their stuff?

I don't mind the bookshelves so much but all of those longboxes have to go.  There's just no denying that I don't really want them anymore.  Sure, there are runs that I'll keep no matter what (all my Avengers, X-Men, Byrne Fantastic Four and even my Micronauts) but do I really need as many post-Byrne Superman books or those Further Adventures of Indiana Jones anymore?

So it has to go.  Ideally, the number of boxes should be about 1/3rd of what it is now but I'll probably add another bookshelf and move it to a different wall.  I'm figuring there's at least a four pronged attack to whittling down my collection:

  • Sell it.  If I can find stuff in this mess that's worth the time and that I don't want to keep, it'll hopefully get sold somehow.  I'll probably be doing more "garage sale" posts around here and various forums to try and get a few ducats out of this mess.
  • Donate it.  I have a feeling a large chunk of this stuff will be donated to various charitable organizations. 
  • Recycle it. So much of what's in here just isn't worth the time or effort it'll take to give it away.  It needs to go one way or another and, if I don't think it's worth selling or donating, it'll end up in a recycle bin somewhere.
  • Bind it.  There's stuff in here that I know will probably never be collected.  I want to take some of that stuff and put it in a nice collection myself and put it on one of the bookshelves where it'll be more appreciated than it it was to stay buried in a box somewhere.
When all is said and done, by the beginning of the summer, I want this collection to be much smaller and more manageable.  That also means that going forward, I'll have to change my spending habits, which I've already done a lot of.  No more impulse purchases.  No more just keeping things to keep them-- if it isn't good, it'll have to go one way or another.

Of course, the first step is always the hardest.  I've looked over the collection a couple of times in the past week and wondered how I could throw any of it out.  I think once I throw the first batch of books in the recycle bin, it'll get easier from there.  I just need to do it.

The comics have to go.  I want the stories that are in a lot of them but not the comics themselves.  I just don't want them anymore.