Pipeline #1043: Organizing Comics Is Not Easy

One of the topics I never get tired talking about is comic book organization.

No doubt, it's my lack of such a thing that continues to force me into thinking about it. I have a dream that someday I will properly organize ALL my comics.

We all know better, though. It's a near impossibility.

Why?

Because new comics continue to come out on a weekly basis. Just when you think you have the perfect structure and organization, another week's stack of comics has you scrambling to find room in a half dozen different places to stick yet another comic book.

You can build in space to handle it, but that won't last forever. Odds are also pretty good that you don't want to buy the extra long boxes or bookcases you'll need to future proof your collection's organization. If you do, those blank spots will kill you. Who leaves blank spots on a book shelf for that time six months down the line when the next volume in that series is released?

It's all terribly frustrating, isn't it?

Chasing the Dragon

I was thinking about this over the American holiday weekend because I finally pulled together all my copies of "The Savage Dragon" into one place. For various reasons, they were separated across two or three boxes in my house, plus one box at a relative's house. I thought I never had the space to bring those back in.

But with the series getting as good as it's gotten again recently, I was driven to do the impossible and bring them back together. That's at least 227 comics to put together. The original mini-series lasted three issues, and the current series is up to issue #224. For the sake of argument, I won't include all the spin-offs just yet.

That many comics won't fit in a short box, and it likely won't fit in a single longbox, either, as I individually bagged and boarded nearly all of those issues.

Admission: I'm cheap enough to put two comics in a standard bag and board. With "Dragon," particularly in the early days, I didn't do that. The issues meant too much to me.

Possible Solutions

Where do I put them all in a way that they're together, easy to find, and will have room to continue to add new issues of the series as it plows along?

• Invest in infrastructure. (Buy more boxes or build more IKEA bookshelves.)
• Enjoy what I own and never buy another comic again.

That's an untenable proposition.

Well, there's one other drastic solution:

• Throw out all the comic books.
• Only own digital comics and let Comixology sort it out.

It's a great solution except for the part where you have to buy everything again, and you live at the whim and solvency of Comixology. Yes, Amazon owns them and would seem a fairly stable bet today, but they have also been known to drop projects and business ventures when they think they have better solutions or they just don't make enough profit.

In other words, there's no good answer and we're all royally screwed.

Everything Old Feels Like New Again

In sorting through 224 issues of the "Savage Dragon" series, I've rediscovered a lot of the comics I loved in the last twenty years and forgot about. There are covers I don't remember, and storylines I haven't thought about in literally a decade. There are characters I don't remember, back-up stories I forgot, and pleasant surprises in the creators list of those, too.

If I reread all 224 issues of the current series, there are whole swaths of these issues I bet would feel brand new all over again.

That's not a slight to the material, either. I don't think there's anything else I've read 200+ issues of. "The Walking Dead" probably comes the closest. I know there are storylines in that book I'm forgetting about entirely at the moment, too. Too many characters.

Savage Dragon fits into that same mold. It's an ensemble book, with various arcs and "movements" over the last 25 years.

Given the other thousands of comics I've read in the same time frame, I don't think it's so bad that I don't remember all of it in graphic detail.

This means I could go back and read a lot of these issues for what would feel like the first time all over again. That's pretty cool. I know there are issues in that pile that I haven't read in 10, 15, and probably even close to 20 years.

That's downright exciting.

So, yes, please consider this my annual reminder to you to not forget about all the comics you have sitting in longboxes behind you somewhere. Especially if you haven't read some of them in ten years or more, you might be surprised by how much "new" reading material you have waiting for you that you're likely to enjoy again.

Plus, when you're done reading those, you'll have plenty of this week's new comics to catch up on to keep you busy.

Win/win.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a rather tall stack of comics I want to read...

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