"Why are you still collecting comics?"

I get asked this all of the time, and not just by my very tolerant wife. But, she is the one who sees me most often as I am thumbing through all of these odd-shaped white cardboard boxes filled with my comic collection, and ask: "When are you going to be done with your collection?" And that's the toughest question to answer, far tougher than "Why did you load the dishwasher this way?" or "Did you not see these socks that missed the laundry hamper?"

Why do I keep collecting comics? Let me hit you first with nostalgia:

My late mother loved comics and science fiction. She was a computer programmer by trade and training, much like the heroes of the used hard science fiction pulps she would buy for me at the local nerd store (remember the Dragon's Nest in Charlotte, NC?), letting me devour the worlds of Heinlein, Robinson, Asimov. Comics were adjacent to this heady stuff- great supplements to the rocket-based conquistadors that I was following in my growing paperback collection. At the beginning, comics were just a fun way to read, but then I met Mr. Chop. Mr. Chop was a friend of my dad's, a nice guy, school principal if memory serves, and like my dad, a model train enthusiast. And, come to find out, he liked comics, like I did. But, he tells me and my dad, that he had a collection of comics. I did too, I said. Well, come over and see what my collection is like, he said.

We all dropped by after T-ball practice the next weekend, because the Mr. Chop's place was in the same neighborhood as the ball field. Dad and I got to see the model train layout (that's the real reason we ended up there), but then we walked into the room in the lower level of the split-level house and it hit me: comic book smell. If you collect, you know what I mean. Pulp paper from the 1950s through 1980s offgasses something that is magical. It's slightly sour, slightly musty, kind of fruity. It’s intoxicating, and to my pre-teen nostrils, it said ‘Old.’ ‘Rare.’ ‘Worth Having.’ 

And then there were the boxes, all organized in a some sort of Hogwart's-librarian sort of way that only Mr. Chop understood. "What do you like to read?" He asked me, the budding comic collector. I wanted badly to impress him. "Blackhawk," I lied. I had never seen a copy of Blackhawk. Why Blackhawk? It was my mom's answer the previous week when I asked her what her favorite comic book series was. And, since Mom and Mr. Chop were probably the same age, I figured "similar tastes." Mr. Chop looked at me in a way that instantly told me that he knew I was making it up. He knew that in 1982 there was no current Backhawk series being published (Dan Speigle would make that happen again in two or three years, just wait), but I think he liked the fact that I'd done some research, even if it was a single data point's worth. He turned toward the off-white boxes, bulging along the wall, reached over the top of one (I couldn't see the contents), and pulled out a thick, clear poly bag and its contents. "Here you go." He handed it to me. I had no idea what to do with it. "Open the flap, take it out," he suggested. I cracked the bag, and that comic book smell hit me, full in the face, kind of damp-smelling, kind of musty, but not mildewy.

The book was Blackhawk #206. It was pretty beat, the cover was probably detached. It was chipping badly. "Take it, it's yours, now." I felt a little guilty, knowing that he'd offered up this book out of his collection based on my well-intended deception. I took it home, and treated it as if it had been printed by Gutenberg himself. Every once and a while throughout my childhood,  I'd take it out of that heavy, scuffed up bag, and read and re-read it, huffing the comic smell like it was a purple-inked ditto sheet, fresh off the printer. It was the start of my collection, really. But this book created a problematic mindset: this Blackhawk issue was an island of story, hanging out there, by itself, introducing characters in a one-off fashion, and somewhere in my mind, I thought: I should get the whole story. These characters have a history that I don’t know about, but I can sense. Where can I get more of this? And soon thereafter, I discovered the Local Comic Shop.

My LCS was a place where I could spend hours (and did) back in the day, rubbing my weekly allowance of two quarters together, and seeing how far I could stretch it to get at least one precious back issue, if not two. These were the days when copies of Strange Tales were almost throwaways, early Justice League books could get snatched up for not far off cover price. That said, I proceeded to focus on buying up the wrong things: In short, I had already become a completionist. I was bent, at the time, on being able to read every story that lead up to the story that I was reading. If Jim Shooter told me in one of those in-frame Marvel editor's notes that I needed to read Uncanny X-men #142 to understand the backstory of Rachel Summers, that book would go on my list of "must-haves." And I'd start saving up to buy that issue, even if it cost me $1.75 in 1985 dollars.

What did that mean for my collection? In the end, it was kind of limiting, because my miniscule monetary resources went toward making sure I had as much of one or two series as possible. Did I miss out on some really gem 1980s and 1990s storylines? Absolutely. I ended up owning less than I read, because I had friends who also collected, and knew that if they loaned my books, they'd get them back in pristine condition, sometimes with a brand new bag (why didn't we use boards back then?) as a way of saying "thanks" without having to spend the big bucks on the book itself. Eventually, I stopped collecting when teenage socializing took up more money than the LCS or the 7-Eleven spinner rack could wrangle out of me. The stories kept being produced every month, but I wasn't buying a book a month anymore, and being a completionist, I ended up getting discouraged, until I just lost track of the continuity, and eventually the hobby. And I did so for the better part of three decades.

But now, I'm back into it, and discovering that the completionist portion of the hobby isn't as hard as it once was, because Internet. But it can be expensive, especially if you've got to overcome that 100-book gap spread over a few decades. And now, I'm discovering that I want to read more, own more than I did as a kid. It's easy now to get distracted by a cool cover or storyline that you read about, and lose focus on those last 100 or so issues before your favorite run stopped in 2011. But that's why I love it, again. What was two quarters is now $10 a book, and it's fun to be able to browse the Internet for the best price for the grade you want, slowly checking off those books that are holding you back from Completion.

And in the spirit of Completionism, we've added a feature: If you want to look for those missing books in your collection, DBLB offers that in both the series view, as well as your profile view. Look for buttons labelled "View Uncollcted Issue." Clicking those buttons takes you to a list of books from a series that you've collected, but haven't completed.