Leaner

I remember when the only comic book title I ever bought was The Amazing Spider-Man by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane. I also bought back issues of The Incredible Hulk by Peter David and Todd McFarlane. Yes, say what I will about him, but Todd was the one creator who really and truly got me into collecting comic books nearly 20 years ago.

Those early years were fun; buying up stuff that I liked, waiting every month for the next issue (and in the case of Amazing, once every two weeks, considering that it shipped fortnightly in the summertime).

As time went on, though, I still collected, but the sense of fun that I got out of it was gone, replaced instead by a growing need to just buy comics for all kinds of reasons that weren't necessarily connected to my enjoyment of the stories. It was subtle at first, but by 1998 I was buying comics featuring characters I couldn't really give a damn about because I'd read about it in Wizard or something like that. For a long stretch I bought Spider-Man's monthly because it was the only book featuring him, regardless of how disappointed I was by the content.

My meager collection of Spider-Mans had grown into several titles, mostly from Marvel but from a lot of other companies as well, only a few of which I liked enough to read more than once or twice after buying them. This trend continued into the new millenium at which point I was picking up comic books almost out of compulsion, with the exception of some titles that I truly enjoyed.

Last year, with the advent of Marvel's Civil War, it became clear to me that the landscape of the Marvel Universe would be radically changed for the next couple of years, which rather made me leery of what the future held. The last time Marvel made a promise like that, the Clone Saga of the 90s was born.

Not only that, but the first half of 2007 seems, from all indications, to be devoid of any creators whose work I follow on characters that I love. Mark Millar is apparently taking the year off, as is Steve McNiven. It seemed as good a time as any to just stop collecting for awhile, at least after all the miniseries I started last year have finished, and so I stopped picking up new titles.

I then got into buying diecast collectible cars, and in the process of doing so, came to a realization.

My toy car collection is small; I only have about 35 to 36 of them, as opposed to over 500 comic books that I have accumulated over the years, but there was one crucial aspect I noted about the collection that made me realize something about my comic book hoard.

For the most part, my car collection only consists of about three or four makes of car. They are mostly Shelby Cobras, Ford Mustangs, and other related cars such as the Shelby GR-1 and the Ford GT. There are a few Ferraris and a couple of Mercedes supercars as well, but overall, there is a consistency to it, a focus on collecting very specific types of cars that I hadn't known since my very first days of collecting comic books.

So I ended up asking myself why I had accumulated so many comic books, apart from the fact that quite a bit of time had lapsed since I started. Did I really like all of the stuff that I bought?

After going over most of them in my mind, I had to conclude that the answer was no.

And so I made the decision to sell a chunk of my collection. It's not because they are or aren't particularly collectible; it's not because I'm trying to cash in on speculation I might have made years ago. In fact, most of these things I'm selling pretty much at value, which puts me at a loss considering inflation. Some of them, I think, are actually pretty valuable but I'm not really trying to make any money off them. (Well, with the exception of the stuff I've put on e-Bay, which I'm selling at their value as stated in Wizard and other authorities on comic book prices. I figure: if someone's going to make money off these things' appreciation, it should be me first of all, and let the others recoup it should the issues continue to appreciate; but that's a relatively small segment of my collection.)

The point, really, is to reduce my collection to the stuff I'm really passionate about. I've always considered myself a selective comic book buyer, and I was therefore shocked to see how much stuff made it into my collection that I wasn't all that crazy about.

What am I keeping? Well, a good three-fourths of my collection will remain very much intact even if all my hoped deals push through. I'm not just keeping the well-worn, newsprint 80s comics that started my collection but a whole bunch of other things as well, stuff I really got into, like the first two years of J. Michael Straczynski's Amazing Spider-Man run or Mark Millar's Spider-Man series, or Frank Miller's The Man Without Fear miniseries. Memorable stuff.

I honestly hope to be able to sell everything I've set out to sell, not so much because I could use the space or the cash (although of course both are most welcome) but I'd rather these comic books find a home with someone who can truly embrace them, someone to whose collection they won't feel like unwanted flab.

My toy car collection is a joy to me because just about everything in it is something I really and truly wanted to buy. I want my comic collection to feel that way again, too.