Weekend Waster

Organize Your Comic Collection – Here is one of those dangerous things that are perfect for a weekend with nothing else to do. Organize your comics. Depending on your collection size, this may take several weekends, but once done, is a big help if you actually want to go into your comics and reread or just look at them. This is also helpful if you want to go back issue hunting.

The first thing to do, is get a sheet of paper, a computer program, say Word, or something else helpful. While you go through your collection, you want to get everything listed and into order. The best way for this is to number your boxes, and take them to your computer (or your computer to them) and start inputting the issues into your program, so that you can add comics in the middle and put them all into alphabetical order. This is the only way to actually get everything in order. Also, while you input the issues from each box, place those in order. This will make things a bit easier later on. It is also wise to put the first letter of the alphabet contained within the box on the outside of it. Once you’ve gone through your boxes and counted your comics, then you can continue on with the actual organization aspect.

Now, print out your sheet of every comic you own, and grab a pencil. The fun is about to begin. You start with the first comic on your list, find it, and place it in the front of one of your boxes. The easiest thing is to buy a new box so you have one empty box to start with. You move through each of your boxes, placing the comics in order, while you do this, the other boxes should empty out a little. When you need a new box, either try to combine two of the half full boxes, keeping the comics in order, or just pull the issues out of one of the boxes. Eventually, you will begin to empty out boxes the whole way and be able to fill back in the comics that you removed. Now, one thing to try to do is leave at least 2-3 inches open in each box, so that when you get new comics you can place them into the boxes. And write (in pencil) a box number with the letters contained in each box to make this easier for you.

Now, once you are done with the entire list, checking off each comic as you go along (and adding any that you might have missed), what you do is keep a spare box for your new comics. Once that box fills up, you can then place it in the regular boxes. And when one of those boxes fill up, buy a new box and split the full box into halves between the two boxes you now have. This will help make things easier for keeping your collection in order, without having any troubles of mixing boxes, or ending up with boxes and boxes of new comics that need sorting into the old boxes. Either way, next time you do need a sorting, most of your comics will be done, so you can go through them much easier, and have more fun pulling out issues and remembering them for the fun they were.

Good luck, it can be fun!