The 1st Great Comic Book Purge
Dec. 1st, 2017 10:23 pmAfter work, I had planned to work out, but the house was in such disarray, I needed to do some cleaning. I started in my comic book room/office. After some dusting, I tried in vain to put the comic books in a semblance of order. Since comic books have almost exclusively come in with none going out, the room is pretty messy by nature. So, beyond dusting, I started going through boxes to see which ones I could purge.
One of the Facebook groups I belong to is a comic book group. A recurring topic of discussion is often how they favor the old comics versus the new storylines. I went through four long boxes of comics in the course of four hours and managed to purge about one and a half long boxes-worth of comics. The majority of them are newer comics, I found. I just don't have the attachment to them like I do the older ones, I find. I also found that I have many duplicates. When I travel and find a comic shop, I'll often hit the dollar bins to just find stuff to read on the trip. These duplicates tend to pile up too.
So I pulled roughly 450 comics. I'd say about 400 of them are relatively new (within the last three years or so) and at $2.99 to $3.99 a comic, that's a lot of money I've spent. It actually made me almost nauseous to think about it.
My plan is to take them to Half-Price Books tomorrow to sell them, but I'm sure the amount I'll get will be miniscule in comparison to what I paid for them. Still, it's recycling them in a way. After I pulled out the comics, I went through my DVDs and purged about 30 movies to get rid of as well as several books from the bookshelf.
I have about 18 more long-boxes to go through at some point. I seriously need to organize them first, but that's a large project in itself, I think. I will say that it does feel good to get rid of some them.
One of the Facebook groups I belong to is a comic book group. A recurring topic of discussion is often how they favor the old comics versus the new storylines. I went through four long boxes of comics in the course of four hours and managed to purge about one and a half long boxes-worth of comics. The majority of them are newer comics, I found. I just don't have the attachment to them like I do the older ones, I find. I also found that I have many duplicates. When I travel and find a comic shop, I'll often hit the dollar bins to just find stuff to read on the trip. These duplicates tend to pile up too.
So I pulled roughly 450 comics. I'd say about 400 of them are relatively new (within the last three years or so) and at $2.99 to $3.99 a comic, that's a lot of money I've spent. It actually made me almost nauseous to think about it.
My plan is to take them to Half-Price Books tomorrow to sell them, but I'm sure the amount I'll get will be miniscule in comparison to what I paid for them. Still, it's recycling them in a way. After I pulled out the comics, I went through my DVDs and purged about 30 movies to get rid of as well as several books from the bookshelf.
I have about 18 more long-boxes to go through at some point. I seriously need to organize them first, but that's a large project in itself, I think. I will say that it does feel good to get rid of some them.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-05 03:05 am (UTC)I've thought about buying comics though Comixology, but I still love the feeling of a hardcopy in my hands.
If you did start purging them, what would you do with them? Donate? Used bookstore?
no subject
Date: 2017-12-11 03:35 pm (UTC)I have quickly adapted to life of online comics. Part of it is just having less stress of the books piling up month after month after month.
The last time I did a big purge I put them on craigslist. I got rid of about 10 longboxes for $200 I think. It was all crap really. If I were to do a real purge now it would include a lot of the big stuff, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spidey etc, so I would probably search out how best to sell, either via comics shops or something like that. Or maybe craigslist, I could probably sell them in bulk for a pretty good amount of money. Right now I'm mostly interesting in letting go of my Marvel books though, which aren't nearly as expansive as my DC collection. DC's will be held on to for some time I think, with full runs of FLash, JLA, Green Lantern and large runs of all the other biggies. DC is still my heart and soul so will be harder to let them go.