An Odd Request Gets Me Thinking

Someone asked me today if I had a photo of my comic collection, showing how big it is. I'm not even sure how to react: it's kind of a boring shot, even if I could get it, because we're talking about a room with heavy-duty shelving, 3 shelves high, each of which has four long white comic boxes on it. About 100 boxes in all, reaching right up to the ceiling. Impressive to me, because I know each box has 250 to 300 comics in it, but to the casual observer: it's a bunch of plain white boxes!

Back before Vicki and I got together, I had my comics out on lighter units of shelving, the comics stacked up in the open (no boxes to be seen). Now that was a sight to behold, even taking into consideration that I had less than half the number of comics then compared to how many I have now. It looked like a library in those days. You could walk up and down the aisles between the shelves and glance at the dozens of covers that were out on display, and maybe even flip through a stack (never mind that you could feel me tense up as you did so) to see that, in fact, each one was different!

When I moved out of my bachelor pad (and if ever there was an apartment that didn't live up to that label, it was mine), I knew I had to box up the comics in order to move them anyway so why not make that transition permanent since boxes provide much better protection for the paper than having them out on display (and stacking them vertically is better for them than lying horizontally, because the spines tend to roll when they're on their backs). I'll admit that was a tough decision to make because I knew it wasn't going to feel the same, having them hidden away as opposed to what I had been used to for probably ten years at that point. There was a real thrill, for me, to walk through the shelves when they were filled with stacks of issues, because the top comics on many of the piles changed from month to month, since new issues were usually plopped onto the appropriate stack, once they'd been read. So it was truly an ever-changing landscape, a feature which I loved.

Reminiscing about this just now brings to mind a dream I had within the last month. It was very vivid, and I think it was a type I've had before: I had to move my comics because of some change in the status quo (moving houses, or someone else coming to live in the house and having to free up space) and now that I think about it, the comics were still stacked in the open air in that dream! It seemed so completely natural, even dreaming it so recently, and there I was re-arranging a couple piles, just like I used to do: this one's gotten too high, so take some off the bottom and move them to the top of the other stack that has earlier issues of the same title. Yeah, that was a part of my life for years! (Now it's been replaced by shuffling titles between boxes, as runs stop fitting in the box they're sharing with other titles and need more space.)

So anyway, now I've added to my weekend list the notion of trying to get a reasonable JPG of all those white boxes on all those shelves!