The last of the comic books

I’ve spent most of the day today organizing the remaining comic books that I’m donating to Superheroes for Hospice. I’d previously given them 25 long boxes, constituting all of my collection up to about 2003, which is when I stopped cross-filing them into my alphabetized long boxes. Since then, I’ve just been stashing them in whatever cardboard boxes I had handy. Well, I’ve now emptied out all of those random boxes and filled six new long boxes!

I’ve kept enough comics to fill four short boxes, maybe around 500 books total, so that’s a much more manageable collection. I’ve kept stuff by P. Craig Russell, Michael T. Gilbert, Stan Sakai, Matt Howarth, and Los Bros Hernandez, mostly. Those guys are among my favorite artists/writers, and some of their stuff isn’t as readily available in trade paperback collections and/or digitally as some other folks work. (For instance, I love Neil Gaiman, but I have most of his stuff in trade paperback or hardcover already.)

I also managed to fill two long boxes with old trade paperbacks and hardcovers that I don’t want to keep. That leaves me, again, with a much more manageable collection of trades and hardcovers.

Once I get these eight boxes out of the apartment, I need to start thinking about reorganizing things, and getting rid of yet more junk. I read a good article this week called The Power of Positive Purging. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of stuff, but I’m really trying to clear things out. And, yesterday, I listened to a good episode of Judge John Hodgman called “Do You Want to Hoard Some Snowglobes?” On the surface, the episode was just about a guy who wants to fill a whole room in his house with stuff from the movie Frozen. But, in discussing this case, Hodgman addressed the more general themes of art vs crap, and hoarding vs collecting. So it was a good thing to listen to on my long drive down the Turnpike to the cemetery yesterday; it was both funny and insightful.

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