Cover Me

So far today, beyond talking to my mother, I haven’t done much but mess with comics.
Bagging some, adding others to the database.
I wanted to break the 800 mark for total comics in the database, so I figured that adding my X-Men comics would do it. I had been at 763 before. I was at 820 after.
That’s not counting the X-Men issues that I have that are missing covers and which I am, as a consequence, going to toss.
I decided that it’s just not worth holding onto them, though in some cases I will, if it’s affordable, attempt to replace them.
That’s what I did for some old Superman comics in my recent order of back issues.
Were they valuable comics? No. Were they especially good comics? Not really. Certainly not by today’s standards.
However, I did have a particular sense of nostalgia for them, so it just seemed appropriate to replace them with copies that were in better shape before simply tossing out the old ones.
I’ve actually got quite a pile of coverless and near-coverless comics. They’re in such deplorable shape for a variety of reasons. Up until I got to college I didn’t really have easy access to proper archiving supplies, but beyond that, I was generally just sort of careless about them. I mean, I was more interested in reading them than sealing them up and hiding them away from light and moisture.
Of course, in fairness to me, a lot of them came to me already damaged, as hand-me-downs, rummage sale purchases, or comics bought in those “4 for 49 cents” packs that had the covers partially or completely torn off.
This was an unscrupulous trick in which (as I understand it) distributors would rip the covers off of new comics that they had a surplus of and report them to the publisher as damaged, sending the tattered remains of the cover in as proof, and get a refund. They would then turn around and package the damaged comics together and dump them on retailers at a dirt-cheap price, which was, at that point, all profit.
(I may be off on exactly how this worked. This stub of an article at Wikipedia has a little information about the process with paperbacks.)
As a kid I got a lot of comics this way, as the local store sold the multi-packs, which were actually 11 cents cheaper than one new comic.
I’ll most likely sift through the whole pile of coverless and near-coverless comics that are destined to be discarded to see if there’s anything else I’m feeling nostalgic about, which means lots of itching and sneezing and dry skin, as I seem to be extremely sensitive to the dust and acid.
When I told my mother that the only thing I had planned for the week was a trip to the comic book store (at its new location), she said, “You’ve been spending a lot of money on comic books.”
I responded, “Gotta do something.”
The weekend at work was largely uneventful. I spent pretty much all day yesterday reading comics online, which was cool because someone had posted a bunch of Fables – one of the comics I’ve begun buying – which allowed me to fill in some of the blanks between what I’d last read and where I am now.
Fables is one of those books that makes me sad that most people are too narrow-minded to give comics a try because of their preconceived notions about the form, because people who don’t read Fables are really missing out.
Oh well.
I’m looking forward to getting my new graphics tablet, though I doubt that it will arrive by Wednesday.
Will it make me a better artist? No.
Is there anything wrong with my current tablet? Not really.
Still, I’ll be glad to have something bigger (insert dick joke here), and there are some useful features that my old tablet doesn’t have.
In any case, there’s not much else going on here, though I’ve got one of those turkey roast things n the oven for dinner and hundreds more comics to add to my database, so honestly, what more could I want?