Comics TV Blah Blah

COMICS COMPULSION

Last Sunday, I read more comics in one day than I ever have before. By the end of the day, I couldn’t take one more panel, but it was glorious. I had about 5 weeks DC backlog, and at least 2 weeks of everything else. This discrepancy has to do with the fact that I read my comics in an odd order – any Byrne or ABC comics first, usually followed by Vertigo, then Image, then the Independents, then Marvel, then DC. And within each group, I read strictly alphabetically (except for the independents, which are alpha by company first, then alpha within each company). This is not really due to some obsessive compulsiveness, but is generally in ascending order of how big the stack is on an average week, and it mixes things up so that I don’t read all the best comics first, and then peter out. But when I get behind, DC (with, on average, the largest stack) starts to get bulky.

As long as I’m spilling my crazy O-C habits, I also have a weird segregation tendency in my books that has an associated unusual hierarchy. I have separate John Byrne long boxes (4, with an additional 2 magazine sized boxes), and all Byrne’s stuff goes in there no matter what (I always promise to write a big thing on my Byrne fetish, but not today). Vertigo’s are filed separately (3 boxes), and ABC’s have their own short box. Dark Horse used to have its own box, but I wound up with just over one long-box of them, and then started buying from them at such a low rate that I merged them with the rest of the independents to keep from having the dreaded loose-box syndrome. Image (5), Valiant (3), DC (about 10 or 11), and Marvel (about 15 or 16) have their own sections, with all other heretofore unmentioned comics filed by company in the independent section (6 boxes). Don’t get me started about the bookcases and magazine boxes.

One odd tendency I have is to file all Wildstorm in the Image boxes, despite the fact that DC owns them now. Since I buy a lot of Wildstorm, this skews my perception of how Image is doing, and a couple of years ago, when people began to talk about how poor Image was doing, I thought “wow, I still sure buy a lot,” but when I subtracted the WS titles, I found “gee, I buy almost nothing from image except Savage Dragon, Powers (not Image anymore), and the Kirkman stuff.” I also file Rob Leifield’s numerous superlatively named offshoot companies with the Image books, as well. The weird thing is, I’m not consistent about this, as I file the new issues of Powers with Marvel, along with other counterexamples I can’t dredge up right now. All the Bones are under Cartoon books, however.

One last weird thing is the question of where you file any inter-company cross-overs. This requires a hierarchic scheme, which, for me, is Byrne, Valiant, Image, Marvel, then DC. Other smaller companies are variable (if Defiant, which I – shudder – have every published issue by, were to have crossed over with anything but Valient, it would be filed with the Defiants, unless Byrne did it).

Is anyone else this weird?

posted by Todd C. Murry @ 3:53 PM