On Business: The Minicomics "Dilemma"

I see the question come up regularly among the small press crowd: how the hell do you store minicomics? They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but they're often quite a bit smaller than a regular comic. They can get lost in a long box or on a bookshelf. Putting just your minicomics in a shoebox or a drawer ends up with a unorganized and constantly shifting pile. Ones that are hand-cut tend to have irregular edges, which can get caught and damaged. So what's a person to do?

The best solution I've found, and what I've been using successfully for several years now, is to bag and board them all, and then file them in my long boxes in and among everything from Marvel, DC, etc. Typically, we think of bagging and boarding as a means to preserve our comics, but they can actually be used for organizational purposes with minis.

The first thing that bagging/boarding does is unify the comics' sizes. In the photo I've included with this post, you can see I've how a variety of differently sized minicomics, once they're bagged/boarded, end up taking the same amount of space. While it might seem a tad excessive in the case of those smaller ones, it does mean that they don't get lost nearly as easily. I'm just as likely to come across Amazing Spider-Man as Bad Chris as that small untitled one with the Disney-esque castle on it. By bagging/boarding, they've become unified in that sense and they can all be stored/filed next to one another with ease.

Bagging/boarding of course also protects your minicomics. That's kind of the original point of bagging/boarding, as I noted above, but it works a little differently here. As you can kind of see if you zoom in on those books, the edges aren't always even, thanks to hand-assembly. Which means that having them sit out loose will make it more likely for individual pages to get caught on something, pulling the whole book apart. Having them bagged prevents this, regardless of how evenly or regularly the pages were cut.

Now it does seem a bit curious, I think, to bag/board a comic that you might not even have had to pay for, or that was clearly printed on a next-to-nothing budget but if your goal is to keep your minicomics around in any capacity and you are able to afford a little more to protect them, the bagging/boarding option is the best solution I've come up with or seen so far.

Related Items On Business