Show Me Your Comic Collection

i am finally getting around to doing a quick catalog sweep of what I own in an xls with listing by title, format, issue, key writer/artist, publisher.
Halfway done with the third bookshelf and will eventually post here but wanted to challenge anyone with an extant list to post their collection or to challenge anyone looking for an excuse to build their own catalog to do so.

Between multiple moves and several bulk buys I am finding things that are occasionally surprising me; i had no idea I had a mostly full run of Omaha the Cat Dancer. Pretty sure I've never read it!

As I recall, I bought four boxes off a guy who was getting rid of some excess and he had about a full longbox of eros comix which I chucked except for the ones with acclaimed artists/writers and i guess i thought wilder and worley fit the bill

I have stuff spread over no fewer than three locations in two different states, and I lost a not insignificant portion of my collection to a termite infestation. In summary, outside of stuff that's currently in my apartment, I have basically no idea what I own and don't own anymore.

ha, well that's kinda where i'm at too but it's all in one place now so i figure now's the time.

I haven't done a full accounting of my comics in years. I was buying up loads of 60s/70s Marvels for a while, and have a bunch of Fantasy Masterpieces/Marvel Collectors Item Classics, that sort of stuff in moderately ratty condition. It's funny to think that Marvel was already repackaging their own stuff within 4-5 years of its initial publication. Aside from that, it's a lot of 80s indie stuff from First, Comico, Dark Horse.

I need to sell my FF #48-50.

I'm actively avoiding noting condition; this isn't a seller's list so much as a reader's list. I just bought my second copy of a twenty dollar magazine because I didn't know I already had it. It's time to take a survey.

anyways, the vast majority of my stuff is VG to G

Mine, too. I really only care that they're not completely beat up and that the cover is still attached.

I guess at this point, between floppies and various trades, I have about 95% of Marvel's '60s output, maybe 70-75% of the '70s (due to a lot of as-yet-uncollected stuff), sizable portions thereafter. Everything X-related through 2011 with the exception of the dead zone from around '96 until the start of Morrison's New X-Men. The first ten years or so of post-Crisis Superman. The complete Love & Rockets (including two complete sets of the original series in different trade configurations), the (almost) complete shared universe Vertigo titles (Sandman, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Books of Magic, et al) and all attendant spin-offs through at least the mid-'00s. Uhhhhh...the complete Archie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures?

I'm not usually superstitious but I'm afraid of taking photos of my unread collection (which is quite large) in case something happens to them before I read them. More so for my book collection, I have over 500 unread books.

My comic collection used to be much bigger. I burned roughly 800 of my comics and gave around 400 away to charity shops and a small pile to my friends.
Of The comics I have read I still own maybe 600. But it's difficult to estimate.

wait, "burned"?
and taking photos is a good time capsule!

A good 200 of them probably shouldn't have been burned but I feel like it was an important day that I enjoyed, it felt very cathartic, but I went overboard with the excitement of it.
I have mixed feelings about what I gave away too but I don't feel like asking for them back because I enjoyed giving them to a friend who would enjoy them.

But at least I got to know there were some things I would regret getting rid of. Because some people get rid of everything and advise others to do the same, saying "trust me, you won't miss that stuff", but now I know what things I'd probably miss owning.

What I regret burning...
- I got rid of lots of Ditko short story clippings. I assumed it wouldn't be too long before Marvel put out well reproduced collections dedicated to Ditko, Kirby, Everett, Heath and others but it may be much longer yet. I don't even slightly regret burning my collection of Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives that butchered their artwork (the main reason anyone likes these comics).

- My Gilbert Hernandez collection. I felt okay doing this at the time because the collected editions were all coming out but what I didn't know was that they didn't collect a lot of the art on the front, back and inside covers. A lot of that stuff still isn't collected and I don't know why they don't include it. I thought maybe the recent Love And Rockets cover collection would have it all but it doesn't.
I didn't maintain enough interest to stay a Gilbert fan but I felt guilty enough that I bought several of his books. I still like his Luba and Fritz drawings a lot.

- My Savage Dragon collection, which was up to issue 145 and included some miniseries and one-shots. I bought a few of the collected editions but they are still way behind. I lost interest again even though it was still pretty good.

when you say burned do you mean fahrenheit 451 ish or...?

Yeah I just stacked them up and set them on fire. I don't know how anything I've said could be interpreted as burning (as in copying) the contents onto some digital format. I was getting rid of them.

i think my confusion was less that you might be burning as in copying and more in that you would actually set fire to a pile of books.
Nothing accusatory here but I find the idea of burning books heretical and it makes me uncomfortable. Why not throw them out?

why not recycle them, if not give them all away

I suppose I should have recycled them but a big part of doing it was to see the excess of crap (and perhaps 200 not crap comics that I really regret burning) I had wasted so much time/money on and to see it burn was satisfying. It was partly to help me change myself.

Part of me was worried that if I put them into recycling, somebody would find them and keep them to sell. Maybe that's highly unlikely, I don't know. I disliked the back issue market selling superhero comics for inflated prices when you could get the collected editions. But relatively few would have been worth much. Most of it was typical 90s-00s mainstream trash. But I really didn't want anyone making any money from this stuff.

I think the dislike of most of the comics was the main thing. Particularly the Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives with the terrible art reproduction, the fact that they were crazily expensive made me want to destroy them more.

I wouldn't burn anything again but I don't see myself ever accumulating that much stuff that I'd dislike that much in the future.

I quite like still seeing stuff in the charity shop that I gave away. My EC Library Picto-Fiction and MD/Impact/Valor were put in the super valuable section of the shop.

Stacks of Jack Kirby stuff went to charity shop too. All those Fourth World, Demon, Omac, Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, Fighting American collections and more.

I would happily have taken all that material off your hands; no idea (outside of catharsis) why you would want to trash that stuff. Terrible repro is still repro! Anyway keep me in mind for future housecleaning.

I am about 1/3 of the way through cataloguing my pile o' stuff but I need to share somewhere. Here's what's currently logged:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xfo0_2cp4b40f67V5Is6E-67c4bEYA6MdxnE4O6dXSU

the vast majority of my stuff is turning out to be a reader's collection. I purged most of the marvel/dc collector stuff in the early aughts and only kept specific artists/writers of interest. More recent purchasing is trade and hardback only so there's a shit ton of fanta and idw and first second and d+q.

I have probably 90%+ of the Marvel Essentials at this point (and I'm gonna try to round up the few that I don't have after the first of the year). I'd love to get them all out of boxes and on the shelves but I think that might be technically impossible.

I was on a phone meeting today in the room with all this in, at which point I thought there might be quite a lot.

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8639/15339049553_0f9567c73d_z.jpg

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7484/15771283368_9716294833_z.jpg

Some closer detail:

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7522/15339170093_8a524293b6_z.jpg
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7555/15933032746_aa13303163_z.jpg

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7494/15771535660_cfda85e6ed_z.jpg
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7561/15771420608_56ab37a5b6_z.jpg

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8562/15773105977_6c4400e848_z.jpg
https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8593/15773113827_c6d711ef41_z.jpg

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7477/15336569274_d7a23ba613_z.jpg
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7533/15933081126_4d10c20382_z.jpg

And then there's the original art and long boxes of floppies. I might have a problem.

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7574/15339237323_6ab4413b40_z.jpg
https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8599/15958243252_d30159344f_z.jpg

Other stuff lying about in various states of reading not in pictures includes Building Stories, Pogo Vol 3, Jimmy Palmiotti's new Sex & Violence thing, From Hell and L&R Companions, about a long box of floppies.

Cool, I'm always reluctant to buy bookshelves because I could buy more books with that money.

we have a lot of overlap! I covet your ditko/kirby collection. What are all the black books next to the popeyes? caniff?
is that a campbell original on your wall?
i'm very pro bookshelf. at least you know you can access them if you have to.

so jelly

I can identify a huge amount of even the stuff that I don't own from just the tiny spines in those photographs. I reckon we have similar problems.

just means you've spent too much valuable life time in bookstores like the rest of us

Black stuff next to the Popeyes are the Fanta oversized Prince Valiants and <gulp> full sets of Trigan Empire and Storm from the Don Lawrence Collection. They are ridiculously priced which is why they were presents, because I'm pretty sure I would have balked at it. But they are BEAUTIFUL.

Yeah, that's the original page of From Hell where the policemen pull the guy out of the river and falsify the report by changing 'bricks' into 'stones'. The repro in the collected edition of that page is particularly poor, you can barely make out the ghosts in the bottom panel. Eddie sold me it in Bristol in 2001, giving me a better deal because I brought him a copy of the Sunday Mail with a report on Celtic winning the Scottish Cup Final. The rest of the original art is mainly Cerebus sketches, but there are some tracings from issues, but there's quite a lot of Chris Weston ((including pages from The Filth, Ministry of Space and The Invisibles) and a Kyle Baker page from The Shadow (when the sons shoot down the helicopter that cuts off The Shadow's head).

That is a nice library. The Spirit hardcovers would be cool to have, that's a ton of them. I'd like to have that Witzend book too. I don't have that many of the DC Showcases,but I got a bunch of Marvel Essentials and a ton of Dredd/2000 AD trades.

i forgot you were britisher aldo; a lot of that stuff is on the outskirts of my awareness.
resurrecting the thread gave me a push to update more on my own list... cataloguing the pile o' cerebus now and moving to the halfway mark in the bookshelves.

Well, okay, so here's the maybe 10% of my collection (and maybe 1/5 of my Essentials collection) that is currently shelved and not obscured by boxes (of comics that need to be shelved):

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8591/15785551397_e55bf57451.jpg

Makes me realise how little Marvel I have.

I'm certainly on the opposite end of the Big Two spectrum. The only Showcase volumes I have are the four Legion trades, the first Jonah Hex and Green Lantern books, and Dial H For Hero. Oh, and Ambush Bug, naturally.

Whereas I did some figuring last night and realized that I need a little more than 20 Essentials to complete the set.

Starting to buy the Masterworks Xmen titles has made me realised what a huge amount i was missing reading that stuff in B&W essentials. It's a world of difference.

Holy cow you guys, that is a lot of fucking comics. Nice work!

By comparison I have maybe two shelves' worth of assorted graphic novels, about six long boxes worth of beat-up DC comics from the 80s and 90s, and 3-4 long boxes worth from, er, the existence of ILC onwards.

Also I think I left High Society on the toilet reading shelf at my parents' house, and it's still there 20 years later.

Both of you guys have Luba hardcover but not High Soft Lisp? I tend to think of them as companion books.

Yeah, I've got High Soft lisp. It's definitely in there.

L&R l-r - Covers book, Art of Jaime, Love Bunglers HB, new Tales of Old Palomar, Bumperhead, Marble season, Luba, Titan Collected editions, New Stories, Birdland, High Soft Lisp, Adventures of Venus, Beto Movie Books.

As a physical object, High Soft Lisp kind of irritates my anal sensibilities in that Fantagraphics seemed to be abandoning the original L&R trade series in favor of the digests/oversized hardcovers and then HSL came out and threw everything off. At any rate, I have all of L&R v2 in single issues. I only have the Luba HC because I was tired of waiting for the post-v1 Gilbert stuff to be released in digests.

okay, i've got about 2/3 of the physical collection catalogued now. I'll take photos at some point i suppose, but take a flip through this and lemme know if there's anything of interest?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xfo0_2cp4b40f67V5Is6E-67c4bEYA6MdxnE4O6dXSU