On History: Ditching Your Personal History

Do you recall a few weeks ago when I found six long boxes of comics out by the curb? What I didn't mention here on my blog was that a week later I found another six long boxes. Then last week, I saw another six out by the street, although by the time I was able to get back there with a car, they were gone. But last night, I came across another five boxes, which I was able to pick up. That's 23 long boxes in total, in case you've lost track. Of the 17 that I picked up, they were primarly Marvel and DC, mostly dating from the early 2000s to about 3-4 years ago, but there were a number that went back to the mid-1980s. All of them were in excellent condition, many of them bagged and boarded.

Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, I figure the guy (I'm assuming it's a guy, judging by the contents of the collection) spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 on these over a five-to-ten year period. From what I can tell from the collection, he was mostly just buying new stuff off the racks as it came out to the tune of $150-$200 a month (that is, most of the major titles both Marvel and DC would put out) with an ocassional bulk purchase of some 1980s runs.

What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to be a slow build-up into a regular collector. It doesn't look like he happened across some random issue of Batamn, started picking up that and eventually spread out to Detective Comics and then all DC titles and then all Marvel titles. The collection, rather, seems to suggest he just dove in pretty quickly. Like he walked into a comic shop and started pulling everything off the "New This Month" shelves, and immediately set up a pull list with all of those titles. To me, this suggests one of two possiblities. Either A) he was a lapsed comic reader who was excited to rediscover comics as an adult or B) he was a speculator hoping to fund his kid's education later. In either case, since the books generally don't track back further than the early 2000s, I suspect his interest was kindled, at least in part, by the Spider-Man and/or X-Men movies that started coming out around then.

I'm inclined to think we're looking at a lapsed comic reader here. At most, maybe half were bagged and boarded. And while there were duplicates of some anniversary and first issues, and the books were pretty much all in excellent condition, they seemed to be that way from a lack of negligence than any particular care and attention given to them. By that, I mean that the books appear to have been read once, filed in a long box, and left alone; they weren't read and re-read and thumbed-through. Further evidence of that can be seen in the handful of non-bagged issues that were filed a little carelessly, and wound up curling beside or underneath other issues. If this were the collection of a speculator, I should think more care would have been given to the books' preservation in a pristine format.

The collection seems to stop a few years ago. Given that every title seems to end pretty abruptly, I would venture to guess this was due to outside factors, rather than any dissatisfaction with the content itself. If it were just Marvel and DC, I could see perhaps a weariness with event-driven stories and company-wide crossovers, but he also dropped Savage Dragon, Usagi Yojimbo, Invincible, and other stand-alone titles. So perhaps the birth of a child, or medical bills, or some other significant change in where his money needed to go forced him to quit.

I get all of that. I think I have a pretty clear picture of where this collection came from, who built it, and why.

What I don't get is the sudden need to purge a collection of several thousand comics that aren't that old by throwing them out. He clearly put some decent amount of emotional investment in these stories by not only keeping current with all of them, but picking up some runs of back issues as well. Not to mention the indication that he enjoyed many of the characters as a younger reader as well, whether that was via Saturday morning cartoons or actual comics or both.

I could understand just getting rid of a collection like that if there were some significant emotional distance. The notion of "Man, I haven't even looked at these in over a decade; they're just taking up space!" There's some personal removal from the version of yourself that was spending $200 a month at the comic shop; you're no longer that person and you've had time to reset your identity. Because even if you stop being "guy who spends $50 at the comic shop every week" you typically don't make a conscious decision to stop identifying yourself that way. It's only in retrospect as other forms of self-identity take over that you realize, "Hey, I'm not that guy any more."

So how does that happen? That a guy who's has self-identified as a comic book fan for at least two significant portions of his life, just suddenly decide he's going to literally throw that part of his life to the curb? What would prompt so abrupt a change and one in which he evidently no longer sees even the monetary value of trying to resell his collection?

Related Items history