A Year in Forums: I Don’t Know How Collecting Works Now

I spent some time in a lot of new pop media forums this year. This is what I observed.

So I’ve always been the collectory sort. Snow globes and statuettes from around the country. We’ve got magnets from each installation of our favorite art exhibit. I like picking up cool, pulp covers of my favorite classic sci-fi books. When I go to comic and anime conventions I bring things to sign or pick something up there.
I’ve been reading comics digitally off and on for years and always had a few trade paperbacks lying around.

When the new X-Men series started this past fall and I heard confirmation the new Venom would start in the winter, I realized what a good time it was for me, personally, to start floppy collecting. I would be getting in at the beginning of some series and the collecting would be natural. So I joined a few communities and started paying a little more attention to upcoming news. Found a few other series I would be able to get in on right from the start, and it’s been a lot of fun.

What I thought would be really fun to do is actually get the entire main Venom storyline in print. I’ve read it all digitally, but what if I had physical copies? And the idea was to do this in omnibus and trade paperback form because the idea wasn’t comic collecting it was story collecting. So I sat down with the books I already had and started mapping omnibuses, trade paperbacks, and other collections to see how I could do it for as cheaply as possible with stuff that was still in print. And being in these new comic forums helped immensely because they knew where all the sales were.

Once I got it all sort of mapped out, though, I was surprised by how…easy…it was. I had a list to work down and I basically just went shopping. Price comparison across shops for a few of the books was probably the trickiest part, but that was just a matter of holding a few tabs open at once.

Then I reached the part of the list where collected editions simply didn’t cover it. Where either the story beat wasn’t collected in a trade paperback or it was simply incredibly hard to find. That’s when I turned to “floppies” (individual paper comics) to fill things in. And this is where I thought “oh! This part will be trickier! I’ll need to check the back catalogue bins of all the local chops in the area. Might even have to wait for the next convention.”

Nope.

My LCS did have a specific five issues of Spectacular Spider-Man that I needed, and I found some fun “stretch-goal” single issues while out and about. After that, eBay gave me the fifteen issues of Carnage and three of Anti-Venom that I needed. Getting the remaining eight took twenty minutes on a single online comic book store. Then they came in the mail.
And it was done.

And it was easy.

And I marveled at this.

Then I also realized, if I really wanted to, I could have a mid-grade copy of Amazing Spider-Man #300 in my hands for as long as it took to pack it up and deliver it. It would be expensive (thus the mid-grade) but in-budget if I moved a few other things around. Really the only thing stopping me is the idea of dropping multiple hundreds of dollars on a comic is a bit of a soft line in the sand, right now.

So now, it’s become crystal clear that it’s all about money. In a world where you can find anything all the time, it’s all about if you can afford. And I, personally, am in the very very privileged position where I can afford quite a bit.

Now I’ve always been a bit more of a “circumstance” collector, fortunately. In the sense of that I don’t just want a thing, I want the story around it. Like my first print run of Lethal Protector has a tale! A yarn to spin! Even this collection I just finished, despite being primarily ordered, contains the story of how I carefully mapped everything to get optimal story coverage with as little double dipping as possible. How I made the decisions I did. About the spreadsheets I combed through and collated data from.

But that’s a self-restriction. A limit I have to actively set on myself.

God help me if I didn’t have that.