Minicomic Storage Update

A few years ago, I posted a piece about storing minicomics. The primary issue a lot of people seem to run into is: how do you store them? Since they come in all sorts of sizes and formats, they never fit neatly on a shelf or in a box or file cabinet or anything. As it happened, I saw two variations of the the conversation come up literally yesterday. The solution I came up with, and have been using for several years now, is what I talked about previously: if you bag and board your minicomics (as shown in the picture here) it standardizes the size with "regular" floppies and you can then file them neatly in a long box.

The problem or issue that I didn't address back then, though, is finding them once again. If I drop the four comics I have pictured here into a long box alongside Detective Comics or Amazing Spider-Man or whatever, they're going to get lost. The comics are going to slide to the bottom of the bags, below the few inches at the top you can normally see when rifling through a long box. For at least three of these, I wouldn't be able to read the titles without pulling the whole issue out, and for two of them, I probably wouldn't be able to see the comic at all!

Now for me, this problem is largely solved by intense organization. I have my entire collection in strict alphabetical order starting with A1 #1 and ending with Zot! #36. If I'm looking for Bad Chris #1 (pictured) I know it's going to be in my long box that starts with Avengers #49. "B" comes after "A" of course, and the long box right after that one starts with Batman/Hellboy/Starman #1. "Bad" comes before "Bat" so Bad Chris #1 must be between those two. Since I have something like 18,000 individual issues in long boxes and the vast majority of them are "normal" sized floppies, it's easy to pin down single minicomics pretty quickly. I can scan the titles across the top, and easily tell when I'm getting close to a specific minicomic title.

However, this could pose a problem if you don't have as many books of that size, or you have a number of minicomics clustered together. You would see the tops of all these baking boards but couldn't tell which issue were looking at without stopping to pull out each one. Mari Naomi actually suggested an pretty simple and straightforward solution to this yesterday -- simply put the name of the issue at the top where you can see it! You could write directly on the backing board or bag itself or, if you think you might want to re-use them for something else later, add it as a Post-It note. If you did use a Post-It, I would suggest sticking that to the backing board and enclosing it in the bag, rather than trying to attach it to the outside of the bag; I think there would be too great a chance of the Post-It falling off and becoming separated from the comic if it were on the outside of the bag. If you wanted to be a little tidier or can't read your own handwriting, printed sticker labels would work as well.

I'm probably not going to go through that and do it with my collection -- I need to keep my entire collection alphabetized to be able to find anything so I already don't have any problems looking for specific issues -- but for anyone who's still looking for a way to organize/manage/sort their own collections, I think this approach could be extremely useful.

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