The Comic Organizer

When I first started collecting comics and going on the hunt for back issues, I was able to keep track of pretty much everything in my head. Even when I started having trouble remembering individual issue numbers, I could recognize covers pretty readily. But then I bough a copy of Fantastic Four #76.

I came home from, I think, one of the local mini-conventions with the find. Probably fairly cheap given that I was still in school. But when I went to file it away, I discovered I already had a copy! I'd apparently bought it before and didn't remember doing so. But then, when I started to slide the new copy behind the one I'd just realized I already had, there was ANOTHER copy there! I had already bought it once, forgotten it, bought it a second time, and forgotten both that I'd already bought it and also what must surely have been some annoyance at having discovered that I'd bought it a second time.

That's when I started keeping a written list with me. It was nothing elaborate, just a small sheet of note paper with the issue numbers I wanted hand-written on it. I'd scratch out the numbers as I picked them, and periodically re-write the list when it had too many scratches on it to be easily readible.

These days, of course, I like to use an online database which I can access via my phone. Although my previous one, ComicBookDB, got shut down and I haven't found a suitable replacement. I gave CLZ a very solid try, but there's no consistency to the titling. That's probably fine if you've only got a handful of titles, but my collection is somewhere north of 25,000 issues now ranging from the 1940s to today; if I don't have a clean set of data, I'm never going to be able to tell what I even have, much less be able to find it. I'm currently working out of Google Sheets, but that is really slow and tedious for the number of comics I have. Plus I think transferring data around has generated some duplicate entries. I'm going to try the Grand Comics DB next and see if I can't clean everything up. (Again.)

But do you know what oragnized people did before databases? This...

KC Carlson actually posted about his use of the cards (sans binder) about a decade ago. He doesn't provide a specific timeline, but I get the impression that they weren't around very long. The copyrights on the two cards he presents give at least a five year range, though, so they were along longer than I would've expected.

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