Putting Things In Order
January 29th, 2009 by Esther Inglis-Arkell | Tags: DC comics, metaLike most of you I progressed from issues in a pile to shelves to a box, to multiple boxes, to boxes stacked several feet deep. Getting things out of them is often a chore, and when I do unearth my old comics, I like to read a full story.
A lot of the time I can get a full story from reading the issues. And mini-series that touch on a few regular runs, like Villains United or Faces Of Evil, don’t cause much trouble.
The problem is with series like Batman RIP, or the War Games books. One issue I was reading Birds Of Preyand they had just completed a mission, the next the Clocktower was burned down and Oracle was talking about the terrible, terrible things that had just happened, and I was combing back through the issues and wondering what I missed.
And what about spin-offs? Nightwing was hijacked for two issues to introduce Vigilante, who then made an appearance in Gotham Underground. All of those series are too far apart, alphabetically, to put in the same long box. Do I file the two issues of Nightwing just before the issues of Vigilante and leave a post-it on the issue of Nightwing that resumes the regular storyline so I don’t wonder what happened to them? (What? Otherwise I worry.) Should I file the Blue Beetle after Infinite Crisis because Jaime Reyes was introduced in that book? And should it be before or after the Booster Gold series?
How does one organize these things?
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…better than the publishers, I hope.
I started putting Superman-related series together some time, ago, regardless of the actual first letters of the titles. Same with Spidey and others. That won’t solve all of your crossover concerns, but it may address a sizable chunk of them.
I remember that Birds of Prey thing, by the way. I never bothered to find out exactly what happened, but I did feel bit of annoyance at being left out of something so consequential. I guess it didn’t feel like something I should find, but something that should’ve found me.
Alphabetically. I may have to hunt around to find a part of a cross-over story, but at least I’ll know WHERE to hunt for it…
I organize used to organize my monthlies in “packs” of stories: Story arcs are together in a plastic large enough for about 3-4. I didn’t bother with longboxes as I instead stored them in piles and grabbed a pack whenever I fancied a story.
Of course, my collection probably didn’t reach more than 3 longboxes at a time as I tried to keep it as minimalist as possible. By the time I was earning enough money to seriously collect, I was buying trades instead.
I never cared much for whatever cross-over or company event they were holding in my books enough to make it change my organizing. I keep it simple: I put a series in their own section in my longbox, and I do it chronologically. If there’s some cross over or continuing story, well, they normally tell you where to go at the last page of the book. For instance, with War Games, I put the issues of comics I didn’t normally collect in the “Extras” section in the back. As long as I don’t become an amnesiac, this system will suit me fine.