I moved recently, a wholly unpleasant but not unexpected enterprise, as I have moved quite a few times in the past few years. And as a recurring part of the process I once again found myself explaining the many mangled cardboard boxes marked “COMICS” to the movers. “Are those really comics?” asked the burly, hung-over moving guy I found on craigslist. Yes, in fact, they are.
I’ve been reading comics since I was a girl. And yes, I am a girl. A slightly off-kilter one, but a girl nonetheless, and one who has been buying, reading, and collecting comic books and their slightly cooler cousins graphic novels for over twenty years. The boxes that I dragged from my parent’s suburban home to my college dorm to the scroungy, shared apartment to the slightly better apartment above the gas station and finally to the real, honest-to-goodness house (with a real, honest to goodness mortgage!) contain the texts that accompanied me from braces to bifocals.
The X-Men issue where Wolverine loses the adamantium? Yup, it’s in one of those boxes. The Age of Apocalypse series? It’s in there too, along with Ghost and Preacher and Hellboy and Ghost World and American Splendor and Love and Rockets. And yet, I am an adult (for the most part). So why do I keep lugging these boxes from place to place? I have work to do and people to look after and Top Chef isn’t going to watch itself. I simply do not have time to open the boxes and read the comics again, but somehow I can’t seem to part with them either.
My books have already been unboxed and placed on the shelves, talismans of hours spent reading “legitimate” literature, but my boxes of comics remain in the basement, lonely and unappreciated. Some of my friends hauled their boxes of comics out of attics and storage units and donated them to libraries and charities, preserving the comics for future generations and pledging themselves to mature, uncluttered lives. I applaud and envy these people, and I think that realistically, perhaps it is time to donate my treasure trove. Yet as I reminisce about what is in those boxes—Rogue and Batgirl and Concrete and Grendel, I get a twisty feeling in my stomach for these friends who have meant so much to me, and I cannot seem to let them go. So I ask of other comic lovers and kindred spirits, what have you done with your boxes of comics? How and when do you say goodbye?
photo by agr
I periodically weed my comics and books. Lots of donations to different libraries. But I have a weird compulsion to get rid of stuff all the time anyway. By this point most of my comics are books, so they can be on shelves instead of boxes which helps (they don’t get hidden out of sight).
Yeah…I did a bit weed out of my comics a while back (bye bye, Millenium mini-series. You gunky.) I thought about selling them, but it was all 80s/90s crap; nobody wants that. Didn’t occur to me to try a library…though again, hard to believe they would have wanted it….
Perhaps if you’d forsaken the weed, you wouldn’t have bought the Millenium minseries in the first place and could have put the money you saved from weed and bad comics and bought some Love and Rockets instead ha ha
Hmm; phrasing didn’t quite work there, did it? In any case, I deny the use of any controlled substances, even though their use is really the only possible excuse for purchasing the Millenium mini-series, which was horrible. L&R would definitely have been a better purchase. I’ll give you that.
Floppies can be harder to donate, but there are more and more places now that are collecting comics for more archival purposes.
Save ’em for retirement. You can reread them then. Life can be long. Junk the Millenium mini-series though.
I almost wish I still had it so I could reexperience its utter worthlessness. That sort of thing is always more fun in theory than in practice though. Probably best the way it is.
during my heyday of collecting, the mid-80’s, comic books that were 20-25 years old had monetary value and there was demand for them. Today a comic book that is 20-30 years old has zero value.
I realise that by the 80’s a lot of people were collecting and preserving comics (the speculation bubble), but print-runs were already on the decline then, and comics themselves are still popular. People saved early silver age comics too–they just saved them the way some people save old newspapers. I know, I used to get them on the cheap that way by running newspaper ads to buy clutter. So, it isn’t like they are so very scarce. But somehow, collecting as an economic activity killed collecting.
I suppose very little has any worth in a disposable era.
I sold my largish collection a very long time ago, when comics were still currency. sometimes i wished i had hauled them around, so i could look at them again, but so much is now available in nicely printed durable books
Just be careful what you donate to whom. One could very well end up in jail if the wrong comic book or graphic novel ends up in the hands of a minor.
I screen everything I donate, and I’ve had to simply throw out some stuff because of its sometimes well-hidden adult content.
Amazing what’ll sell on ebay. Someone actually bought some Marvel New Universe off me I’ve been lugging around for 25 years. I dunno, kids these days…