Comics, Comics, Everywhere…

As I’m off work this week, I thought I’d try and make myself (relatively) useful.  I decided to spend a bit of time performing one of the most thankless tasks known to man: sorting out my comics.

I stopped reading monthly comics about 10 years ago for two main reasons.  The first was that I was buying a house and could do without the extra expense (comics are bloody expensive).  The other was that I used to buy my comics through mail-order and the deliveries had got so messed up that I was missing individual issue in lots of series that I was reading.  As comics tend to run continuous storylines, this meant that I didn’t read any subsequent issues of titles where I was missing one.  This led to me amassing (probably) hundreds of pounds worth of unread comics.  I could have sorted it out at the time, but it just seemed too much hassle.  Buying a house gave me a perfect excuse to draw a line under it and move on (you can read more on the sorry tale in this post).

All those comics remain unread.

I’ve been meaning to have a sort out for ages and today I finally got around to starting.  The task of sorting through boxes of comics and determining which ones you’re missing is a tedious one.  I won’t bore you with the details; I’ll just try and share the things that I learnt.  The main point is that I was an idiot not to sort this out at the time.  I wasted A LOT of money out of sheer laziness.

The comics I came across fell into these categories:

• There are quite a few runs\mini-series where I only need one or two issues to complete them.
• There are quite a few runs where I need loads of issues, but somehow feel compelled to try and complete then.  Even though they’ve all been sat there for a decade, unread.
• I’ve found lots of random titles where I have only one or two issues and so it’s not practical to try and complete the run.

To my surprise, I found myself willing to sell some of these “spare” issues on eBay, in an attempt to fund the purchases that I do want.  With that plan in mind, I checked out eBay and, weirdly, no comics seem to sell on there.  Virtually all the comics whose auctions were about to end had no bids on them.  I checked 2 or 3 pages and this remained the case, even for issues that you would expect to easily sell.

To counter this, I looked online for some of the issues I need and they were inevitably pretty expensive.  It’s almost more cost effective to just buy the collected editions instead of the few issues I need.  In theory, I could even sell the ones I don’t want to fund the difference.  The only problem is that comics don’t seem to be selling.

At least I made my first step by sorting through some of my back catalogue, but I have sadly unearthed an even more tedious problem. If anybody has a realistic solution then I’d be more than grateful for your assistance.  Those comics need to be read.