Promise-ary Note: Cleaning Out Comics

My task for this week was to give away something I didn't want to give away.  It took me a long time to figure out what that thing would be, but I finally stumbled upon it as I was picking up my new comics for the week.  To my dismay, the logical answer was comics.  The moment this realization came to me, I was a little heartbroken.  I'm a collector of stories, of pages, of print and images.

Giving up comics means saying goodbye to stories I've loved and cherished at some point in my life. I do revisit old comic storylines.  I go back into my "super secret" attic space and nestle down alongside my longboxes.

(Let it be said that I'm reluctant to break down the following numbers as my wife reads the blog, but here we go.)

I currently possess 17 longboxes of comics.  Each longbox holds between 200-233 comics each.  This means I am in possession of roughly 3400-4000 or so comics.  This is a collection that has been building since 1993 when my friend Seth Ferris got me hooked with my first hit of comic books. (Yes, I AM using the lingo of a drug pusher.  It is intentional.  I blame you, Seth.) It was the X-men Inferno storyline, and I was sunk from that moment forward.

With this many comics lurking around my attic, there had to be some I could stand to part with, and that's where today's task comes in.

I knew the back of the room was full of older books, mini-series, or series I'd stopped collecting, so I started there.  I came across some nice older comics in my search.  Retro gems like:

It doesn't get any teen angst-ier than Fallen Angels from the 80's

I also encountered some more recent books like:

When 22 pages of a story come out once a month, 7 years ago feels recent.  This comic came out in 2007.

Then there were creators I loved, but wound up not following specific storylines:

The rest is a mish-mash of alternate realities, mini-series, crossover tie-ins, zombies, and the like.

The point of this story is that they are all up for grabs for the first person to get in touch with me.  They will not be bagged and boarded as I am going to keep those for future comic purchases, but you will receive, for free, a long box of comics.  Let the race begin!!!

If I had to admit a dark secret, I do feel a little better getting rid of some of these books.  Hopefully they will live on in the lives of some younger person who will enjoy them just as much as I did.