Comic book resurgence

I used to be a big time comic book collector and I guess you could say my tastes are more mainstream than Independent titles. Mainly this is due to income and the lack of a will to spend so much money on the titles I would LIKE to read. In reality I can afford only 7-8 titles a month if that and I have to be very picky.  A long time Captain America, Avengers, and Iron Man fan as well as Thor and you can see how fast my monthly allotment is used up. Still I have all my comics from the 80's when I started through the 90's and into the 2000's and they are all kept nicely stored away. I mainly started in 1985 and collected off and on since then. While my collection is not crazy like some people you see with full walk in storage facilities in their basement I think I did ok for how much money I had. Are they worth alot? Not really. Most of the titles I had from the 80's were Marvel and they are not worth too much on the market. I went cold turkey through a lot of the 90's and then around 2001 picked it up heavily again.

Recently I have gotten back into the groove of reading my titles since I last stopped back in June. I had a huge backlog of things to read and I am now just slicing into them. You know how you sometimes collect things but don't actually ever use them? That was me and that was why I stopped last summer. I had too many coming in and not enough being read. Eventually I filled a long box with unread titles and had to stop. I made a pact with myself to not subscribe to anymore titles until I caught up. Some of the things I had to read went all the way back to the Secret Invasion and Dark Reign story arcs in the Marvel Universe. I wasn't a big fan of the Secret Invasion as I just viewed it as a limp tool for Marvel to bring back some dead heroes.

So I cut into my unread stack rather well but ultimately broke my own promise. I still have all the Avengers, Iron Man and Captain America backlogged issues to read and I did subscribe again recently but I will continue to maintain a steady reading pace. Currently I am knocking out War Machine 1-5 and hope to tackle Ultimate Avengers 3 by the end of next week. Part of what is taking my time is play MMO's and computer wargames. I may have to set aside some rotating schedule. While I have stopped playing WoW I do have an active subscription in Aion, Fallen Earth and the DCUO beta. If I can take my time during the day to unplug and just relax I could get more titles knocked out.

Next post I will look at how I organize my comics with the Comic Collectorz software.