Author: Andrew Huey

The last of my massive comic book donation has just been picked up! I gave away a total of 31 long boxes of comics, and 2 long boxes of trade paperbacks and hardcovers. I should have an actual count of the books soon, from the guy I gave them to. Since a long box fits about 300 books, I’m guessing I had around 9000 comics. (Which seems like way too many.)

My next project should probably be cleaning up and organizing some of the other books I have stacked up — novels, computer books, and the like. Some of the old computer books are probably going to have to go right in the recycle bin. And maybe it’s time to throw out most of old college textbooks too. I’m going to take some inspiration from this article about the New Yorker’s recent move to 1 WTC:

The thing that’s worth keeping is the thing you do next.

I took today off from work. The original idea was that maybe I’d go into NYC  and do a few things, but the weather has not been good, so I stayed home instead. I’ve been browsing the news from the Angoulême International Comics Festival. There’s an article from The Washington Post, and another at The Beat with some interesting information and links. One of these years, I should go, though I imagine it would be a pretty expensive trip, and the language barrier would be an issue.

I have a whole list of things that I could probably be taking care of around the apartment, but instead I’ve just been reading and watching TV. I did a little bit of reorganizing, trying to figure out how to best use the space I’ve cleared up by donating so many comics and books. But I haven’t done anything major.

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.

I went through all my long boxes of DC comics today, to prepare my next batch of comics for donation. I decided to donate them all, not keeping anything from those boxes, but I thought it would be fun to take a few photos of the covers from some of my favorites (and just some oddball covers, for giggles.) This is a pretty random sampling, but a few of these are books that I remember buying back when I was a kid, when I could go down to the corner store, and buy a comic book and some gum with my fifty-cent allowance. Those were the days!

I’m not sure how this gallery is going to look, but here goes…

For the last few years, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my rather large comic book collection. I’ve amassed 25 long boxes of the things, neatly sorted and filed, plus assorted short boxes of books that I never got around to sorting and filing into the long boxes. All told, around 8000 books.

I was buying 20 to 40 books per month for about 20 years, mostly via Westfield Comics. At some point in 2008, I realized that my reading had slowed down enough that I was developing a bit of a backlog of unread books. I cut down on the number of titles I was buying, then discontinued my regular Westfield orders entirely at some point in 2009. Since then, I’ve occasionally bought a few books at a con or at a comic store, but not much. (And I’m still working my way through my backlog, though it’s down to less than 100 comics now.)

I started seriously thinking about either selling or donating my entire collection (or at least most of it) a few years ago. I’d looked into a few possible donation opportunities, but none of them panned out. And I called a few people who might have been interested in buying the entire collection, but never managed to close a deal with any of them.

Through this process, I discovered that getting rid of a sizable comic book collection is actually a bit of a challenge, if you want to do something other than toss the books in a dumpster and send them off to a landfill. There are folks who will buy entire collections, but they won’t pay much for them, and they usually won’t go too far out of their way to get them. And there are a few charitible organizations that will take comics, but they’re usually not looking for very large collections. And selling the collection off a bit at a time via eBay is way too much work, for a big collection like mine.

I hadn’t really put any effort into getting rid of the comics in 2014, but I decided to get serious about it again near the end of the year. So I dug out my old notes, reviewed a few possibilities, and did some more Googling. I stumbled across this article about Superheroes for Hospice, a charity comic show benefiting Barnabas Health Hospice. I contacted the guy in charge of the event, and this turned out to be a perfect opportunity. Stopping off in Somerville on his way home from work doesn’t take him too far out of his way, and he can easily fit a dozen long boxes in his car. So I gave him most of my Marvel books last week, and most of the independents this week. Next week, I’m going to try handing off the DC books. And that will take care of the 25 long boxes that are cluttering up my dining room.

After that, I want to go through all the unsorted books that are cluttering up my bedroom, get them into long boxes, and hand those off too. I hadn’t quite realized how much unsorted stuff had built up. In my mind, I thought I had enough to fill maybe 2 or 3 long boxes. But, after looking at it all more closely, I think it’s going to be more like 5 or 6 long boxes. So I’ve had to order more long boxes. (I ordered them from Westfield, conveniently using up the remaining credit I had with them, which I’d completely forgotten about.)

I’ve pulled out some stuff I want to keep, and I hope to limit that to about five short boxes. That’s few enough that I can keep them in my closet, out of the way. And maybe I’ll talk myself into letting go of those at some point too.

While I’ve worked my way through most of my backlog of regular ink-on-paper comics, I’ve managed to build up a new backlog of digital comics. I’ve bought a lot of stuff from Comixology, Dark Horse Digital, and various Humble Bundle sales over the last few years. The nice thing about this new accumulation is that it doesn’t take up any real space in my apartment! And I’m thinking about re-purchasing new digital copies of some of the stuff I’m selling off. Or, in some cases, maybe re-purchasing those books in trade paperback or hardcover reprints. But really I shouldn’t get ahead of myself on that, since I still have so much new stuff to read. (And I haven’t even mentioned my backlog of trade paperback and hardcover collections that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet.)