Let the Stockpiling Begin!

Something I do most years, and am in the process of doing once again this year, is to cut back on the comic reading in the last couple weeks leading up to my Christmas break. Part of the enjoyment of being off for a week is knowing that I'll have some good comics to read over that stretch. And, depending on how much free time I end up having, I also hope to also dust off that Preacher series and give it its first re-read, in anticipation of the HBO series based on it. I've been trying to think of other series I might pull out of their long boxes, were I so inclined. The previous JSA run would be a logical candidate except I re-read most of it about a year before it ended (so about a year and a half ago). It's been quite a bit longer than that since I read James Robinson's Starman series, but I did do a complete re-read after it ended. All of the significant Alan Moore runs have been read many times, so there's nothing there. Preacher kind of stands out, then, as a series that I really liked but have never re-read, and in fact haven't read at all in more than five years (quite long enough for me to have forgotten many of the details).

And of course, one of the nice perks of pulling out older comics and re-reading them, is that it helps me justify (in my own mind) the whole idea of collecting them, not just reading them and then selling them. When I buy comics and only read them once, they're not a very good return on the investment, in terms of entertainment value. Certainly those first few hundred comics I bought, back in my childhood, paid for themselves many times over as I read the covers right off of them! I can still remember what a thrill it was to paw through the pile and find one that I hadn't read in a few months! It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that some of them were read ten or fifteen times, over several years. I don't see anywhere near that level of re-readability these days, both because I have too much selection to choose from now compared to when I was getting 25 cents a week in allowance, and I don't have as much time to spend at it. But even reading each really good comic from the past ten or twenty years two or three times makes me feel pretty good about the whole arrangement, as funny as that may seem to some.