Well, hello there double entendre blog post title. For the record, floppies are single comic book issues, and stiffies are trades (or trade paperbacks, also called graphic novels). Now that we have that out of the way...
I've been a comic book reader and collector for about 28 years. I started out slow with just a few titles, went into high gear later (reading 25 or more monthly titles), and then got more refined (down to about 10 monthly titles or so). Now, those 10 books are still things that I want to read, but I'm facing several problems:
Time
I'm married with two first-graders and a video game habit. I barely have enough time to write the occasional blog post, let alone read a stack of books.
Price
$3.99 for a single comic book? Are you serious?
Storage
Over the years, I've collected thousands of comics. Unless I open a comic store within the next few years (not likely), I'm going to have a real issue with comic storage space. and at this time, I refuse to start getting digital comics. I mean, this is one of the only hobbies I have that don't rely on anything electronic; I don't want that to change.
Crappy Comic Retailers
There was a store in Utah called The Paper Dragon. I found it when I was stationed at Hill AFB in 1994-1998; it was run by a guy named Jerome, and it was the best store on the planet. Never a missed book in my box, always excellent recommendations. Then Jerome sold the store, and it went into the crapper. That was the last great comic store I've run across.
So, I've decided to cut back to only 2-3 monthly floppies, and get the other titles I want to read as stiffies. It won't give me any more time, but it will definitely save on money and space. One of the downsides is that trades are less "collectible" than single issues, but I think I'll be able to look past that; I've always been a reader first, and a collector second.
Has anyone else out there faced the same turning point in their comic collecting lives? What was your solution?
3 comments:
my solutions were the below pictures, plus the Marvel.com digital comics year subscription. 60 bucks per year for a lifetimes worth of comics at my fingertips. So worth it
http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/387580_10151027828750093_580525092_22068107_147935248_n.jpg
and
http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/381697_10151027829645093_580525092_22068115_651835134_n.jpg
I'm not going digital (at least not any time soon), but I like the look of that bookshelf full of trades :)
I have to say that working with the stiffies appears to be the way to go - I had NO IDEA that floppies were 3.99 each nowadays! I suppose I was in for that shock when I went down to the new comic store I just found last week.
The thing about the stiffies is that you can get the best deals on them from all the different online book retailers. It is easy to commonly save 20-30% which means you have saved 70-80% from the cost of all those floppies...
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