Comic-al

I know lots of people who collect comics. The theory is that they’ll be worth something someday, but the fact of the matter is that I just don’t have the patience for collector’s hobbies — when I buy a comic, I’m getting exactly the face value out of it — a half-hour’s reading enjoyment, maybe a bit more. I’ve got issues #1-#3 for Spawn, Punisher Warzone, Wildcats, Youngblood, Crimson, Witchblade, and a bunch of other stuff for which I know as well as anyone else I’m never going to go though the research and effort necessary to get any sort of collector’s “payoff” for, nor do I really want to keep most of them — most aren’t much more than one-shot entertainment to me, and that’s fine — that’s why I bought em.
But why did I keep them?
Something De mentioned last week about how she turns over books to the Goodwill gave me an idea — I’m selling my unused game books on Amazon because they’re usually in pretty good shape and I stand a chance of getting a reasonable price for them, but there’s no way I want to go through the hassle of shipping bundles (and it would have to be bundles to be worth the pain of dealing with shipping) comics to some collector who then bitches that I touched the pages five years ago and left a latent fingerprint on Frank Castle’s ass on page 21.
So this morning I bundled up all the issues that I didn’t forsee any interest in ever re-reading (a good tip: I haven’t since I bought them) and hauled them off to Goodwill: the first two-and-a-half years of Buffy, 18 months of Angel, the whole Judd Winnick run of Green Lantern, and anywhere from 2 to 12 of various other series. 200 issues, all told, bundled together into ‘related’ groups that the guy at the store told me would probably be exactly how they’d sell them.
Which is cool. It’s nice to think that all the Buffy issues will stay together and even nicer to think that some kid who would never normally have a chance to read a comic at 2.50 an issue might be able to get 30 of them for 25 cents each or less.
It felt pretty good.