Free time

Well, Dad, it took several years, but you were right—there did come a time that I wanted to paint and/or stain these:

It's the ones on the right and one of the 3-drawer units in the middle that are my original homemade comic-book cabinets, built some time back in my dad's garage. The other center unit is newly built, the one on the left and another 8-drawer unit out of frame were built around the time I moved into my current abode. Out of frame below are ones made when I was a teenager by a contractor that my mom had hired to remodel her kitchen. (Those needed some adjustment; the contractor didn't really know what they were for. Those adjustments were also made in recent years.)

I also replaced, recut, and/or repositioned the 12 front panels on those initial builds, as they were all a little wonky in one way or another, and the 8 fronts in the out-of-frame cabinet that were originally done on the cheap and didn't fit that well.

Even with the new unit, these are all full. But there's no longer any overflow (well, not much) other than the batch previously pulled for eBay sales. There's room for maybe one more unit before drastic measures would have to be taken, so I'd best get really cracking on the eBay selling to slow the growth. This is a collection I've been amassing since I was 10 or 11 years old, some of which I really value having and a lot of which is, frankly, chaff. But collectors of anything will understand—even when trying to pare down and remove some chaff, there's always net growth.

It's been a fun project at any rate, something I had time to do since I don't have a lot of client work at the moment. I'm not minding that, really. Thanks to my mom willing me some resources, I'm not desperate for cash; between the work I do have and my umpiring gig, I'm getting by reasonably comfortably. A little woodworking in the garage has been a nice way to spend part of my summer.

It all looks a lot better now, despite some remaining wonkiness in some of the alignments. I can live with it.

I know, I know: Nerd.

Tagged Comics, Projects   |   Posted on August 10, 2024 at 12:31am   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Comics POV

A superhero and his dog

Every once in a while, someone in the comics world will try something weird, a kind of experiment in format or style. John Byrne did an issue of Fantastic Four that was read sideways. DC had a run of a special Batman title that was in black and white to give it a more noir feel. Marvel had a month wherein their entire line was purely visual, no words.

A few months back—I'm a bit behind, I just read it yesterday—DC published an issue of Nightwing illustrated entirely from the title character's perspective. It took me a couple of pages to understand the gimmick, but once I did I thought it was cool. It was writer Tom Taylor and artist Bruno Redondo's take on the classic M*A*S*H episode "Point of View," which was shot as if through the eyes of a wounded soldier at the 4077th.

The heads-up display is fine, but Nightwing needs to adjust his side mirror, it's not doing him any good.

But more than the M*A*S*H episode, it brought to mind two issues of Hawkeye from about ten years ago. Writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja delivered a run of that title that is among the best mainstream comics has ever produced, and issue #11 and #19 are standouts because of the perspective the story is told from. It was nice to be reminded of them and I'll have to find some time to dig those issues out and reread them.

Hawkeye #11 is entirely from the perspective of Hawkeye's dog, Lucky. Dialogue balloons mostly contain chicken-scratch with the occasional word Lucky recognizes—" \\||| \ \\  \|||| || sit \||| -\--||| bad ||\\\//\/\\||| lucky \\\|--///\|| down"—while the reader is shown how Lucky perceives the world through pictograms that translate the smells and sounds he's sensing, as well as how Lucky identifies various people by their associations with odors, events, and objects. The story follows Lucky as he discovers a resident of his building dead on the roof, then finds all the clues needed to find out who killed the guy. It's so, so good.

#19 focuses on the fact that Hawkeye had lost most of his hearing thanks to being caught up in an explosion in a previous issue and is told from his auditory perspective, which is to say, the word balloons are empty and he communicates via untranslated ASL. Just brilliantly done. 

The Nightwing issue is a nice little gimmick. I appreciated it. It's well drawn and the story itself is fine, if not particularly memorable in and of itself. But what it really did was make me appreciate Fraction and Aja's Hawkeye all over again.

Tagged Comics   |   Posted on August 28, 2023 at 7:30pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Collecting

“Why do you even have these?” a friend of mine asked me.

I was applying some paint to the recently-constructed cabinets I'd made in my garage, cabinets that were custom-designed to hold comic books. I stopped, looked up, and found myself at a loss.

I mean, I had an answer, it was there, but articulating it was proving difficult.

See, I love comics. The medium, the wide variety of cartooning styles found in them, the characters that have permeated our culture, the more obscure works that most people have never heard of. (Well, not all of them, but a lot.) I started reading them longer ago than I can remember and was a fan from a young age of Batman and Captain Marvel (the original '40s one, during his '70s revival) and Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four and other superheroes. I read the occasional Archie comic or Yogi Bear issue too, but mostly I was into the standard DC and Marvel superhero soap operas.

Then, when I was around 11 or 12, I discovered comic-book specialty stores. Back issues. The collector's market.

It was a revelation. At that point I became not merely a fan, but a collector. I learned that the condition of one's comics is vital. That one needed to invest in protective sleeves for them, that storing them lying flat is bad—they don't actually lie flat, you see, the spine side creates a bend in the stack and bent comics are worth less—they should be stored upright. That comics drawn by certain artists are in more demand than those by other artists, that there are "key issues" of long-running titles that command big bucks (or at least "big bucks" by the standards of a 12-year-old in the early 1980s).

Back in the day, my goal was to acquire every issue of Fantastic Four. Never did it, as the first dozen-plus were too pricey for me.

My friend had been holding a copy of Secret Avengers, which was in a small pile of comics destined for the "eBay box," which had by then become a series of boxes. I stalled a little bit in answering her question as I tried to find the right words for my response by going on a tangent. "Well, that pile I'm not keeping," I said. "Those are eventually going on eBay. Even with these new cabinets, I don't have enough room for everything so some stuff will have to go."

But the majority of them, yeah, I was keeping. And I was adding to the mix all the time, spending anywhere from $40 to $100 a month on new comics (which, accounting for both inflation and the changes in the comics biz since then, equates to what about $8-$20 would have bought in 1987, so I feel like I've cut down a lot since my teenage comic-buying heyday). Why do I have them?

One of the more fun new comics right now is Not All Robots, by Mark Russell and Mike Deodato Jr.

Sure, some of them have decent monetary value well above what I paid for them and keep increasing over time. But most just kind of hold steady or never had much to begin with. If it was about "investing," I'd only have kept about 30% of my collection over the years.

I have them because I like them. Because it's a hobby. Because I am, at my core, a huge nerd. Because my growing-up years were so influenced and tied to the morality plays of Marvel Comics and because I developed a deep appreciation for the talents of people like Marshall Rogers (RIP) and Steve Rude and Neal Adams (RIP) and Mike Deodato Jr. and Terry Moore and Alex Ross and Brian Bolland and Clay Mann and the recently-deceased George Pérez (RIP), among quite a few others.

But that doesn't really get at why I keep them and collect them. I mean, they take up a lot of space. Moving them is a royal pain. Keeping them organized is time-consuming. I've spent a lot of money on their storage (though a lot of that was fun too, building the cabinetry on my own and, on some of them, with my dad). There are reasons not to.

Yet, I do keep them and I do have them. My inventory software (yes, I have inventory software for this) has my current tally at about 8,700 comics, not including some of the 1,000-plus in the eBay boxes. Storage capacity is now once again full up. More keep coming in. Why do I have these?

Because I want to.

Any attempt at articulating the not-rational yet deeply held reasons for it basically comes down to that. I have these because I like them, or in some cases because I did at one time. I keep them because I want to.

As space continues to get tighter more chaff will be moved into the eBay piles, but eventually I will probably make yet another storage unit. It's my own version of the never-ending battle.

Tagged Comics   |   Posted on September 2, 2022 at 3:46am   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

What Dreams are Made Of

It's 4:00am and I can't sleep. Not an altogether unusual occurrence, but not a welcome one either. But not being asleep does mean I'm not enduring another of my subconscious Twilight Zone episode-style dreams.

I've been having a recurring dream of late—well, the actual dream isn't recurring, but the theme and premise is—in which my late mother shows up alive. My science-fiction- and comic-book-reared brain knows that in those genres, death isn't necessarily a permanent state—Spock came back thanks to the regenerative properties of Project Genesis, Buffy was magically brought back by the Scoobies, Captain Jack Harkness dies and comes back all the time. In comicdom, characters are killed off and brought back as marketing ploys with annoying frequency; we used to say there were two kinds of dead comic characters, just-for-now-dead and "Bucky-dead." (We used to say that, because after decades Marvel even resurrected Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier, so even Bucky isn't Bucky-dead anymore.) Captain America, the Human Torch, Batman, two different Robins (with a third only thought dead), Doc Ock, and Wolverine are just the most recent characters that come to mind that have come back from the great beyond no worse for wear. Oh, and Phil Coulson. Tahiti is a magical place.

So I guess it's not surprising that my subconscious would generate a scenario like the one I was treated to lat night/this morning, that had both my mom and her husband returning because of some sort of time-dilation mumbo-jumbo during their travels, putting me in the awkward position of having to explain to them that I'd sold their house and depended on some of their money now, oh, and that this was going to seriously fuck up all the struggles I'd been going through with banks and fund managers to get control of their assets. In this dream scenario, I somehow also knew from the get-go that this was a short-term return, that the metaphysics of this mumbo-jumbo just meant I was going to have to go through them dying all over again, and in my mom's case, her finding out that their house was now owned by somebody else just prompted her to drink continually, berate me, and call me unprintable names.

Previous iterations of this dream-theme weren't so wholly unpleasant, in that in them I'm glad to see my mom again and then they veer into unpleasantness when the re-dying happens (it always happens, part of the theme). The details generally fade pretty quickly upon waking up, but the basic outlines remain.

I have, of course, been dealing with a great many entities and institutions since she passed away regarding assets and various executor-like things, most of which eventually got resolved after varying amounts of frustration and outrage. One remains unresolved, and as that item has been occupying a chunk of my waking time in recent weeks (lawyers and judges and probate, oh my) I guess my brain decided to use it as ready-material for REM movies.

Thanks a lot, brain.

Tagged Mom, Comics, dreams   |   Posted on July 21, 2017 at 4:59am   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Right Angles are Our Friends

Thanks for doing this with me, Dad!

You might recall I posted some months ago about my comic-book collection and its steadily oozing expansion that threatens to consume a whole room in my home. As discussed then, I found some videos on the Interwebs from people that have built themselves some customized storage units and set out on a similar undertaking.

I drew up some "plans," which is a generous term; they were adequate, but not especially organized. I sought out the materials I would need. Then I left it alone for a while while other things came and went.

But last month I drove down to see my dad in Palm Springs, Home Depot gift cards in hand, thinking it would be fun to do this project with him and a good excuse to visit for a couple weeks. Which it was. Dad and I built four cabinets with three drawers each to house roughly 2,500-3,000 comics in total.

It was a learning experience as well as a good time; I've done a fair amount of tinkering and improvising things in my day, but never a start-from-scratch building project like this. We made some mistakes.

The workstation

First off, we bought wood that did not match my plans' specifications — I planned for half-inch thick boards, but I got wood planks that were slightly less than half an inch thick and did not make any corresponding adjustment to my specs. Thus, we made drawers that were ever-so-slightly narrower than spec and drawer housings that were not uniformly wide. So a number of them had to be "MacGyvered" to work properly by shimming the rails with whatever was handy (metal washers, wood scraps, cardboard).

Almost half an inch isn't actually half an inch. Multiplied enough and you need a quarter-inch of shim.

More annoyingly, I didn't think through a proper way to attach the front panels of the drawers. They were intended to overlay and extend beyond the face of the drawers by a half-inch on all sides, but every attempt to attach them was off-center and/or crooked. In order to get them all to fit, we ended up trimming a number of them rather than continue to try over and over to reposition them properly.

Also, though we had a fantastic table saw for the smaller pieces, we didn't have a good way to cut down the larger ones. We improvised something that seemed to work adequately, but then in the process of assembly realized that many of the pieces we cut were not cut straight; the bottom edge would end up being shorter than the top edge, that sort of thing. Not by a lot, and in and of themselves, the pieces worked fine, but in the overall assembly, there were enough weird angles and slight slants to things to cause frustrations and some funky weirdness to the finished product.

In the end, they are completely functional and, I think, more than adequately appealing. But as my dad said while trimming one of the crooked drawer fronts to make it fit alongside the two others in the unit, "at least when anyone looks closely at these they'll know they were home-made."

I'll eventually paint or stain them, but that's something for another day; I don't plan on staying in my current abode all that much longer, so that'll wait until I know what my new place will look like. Plus, I still have a ton of overflow; I'll want to build more of these then, too. With more attention to measurements and right angles.

Of course, now I have an elegant solution for how to position the front panels to attach them properly.
Maybe I'll find it worth the hassle to remove and reattach them later.

The sides of this drawer are cut at a not-quite-right angle, making the front attach with a bit of a warp.

Far, far better than the endless sprawl of cardboard boxes I was previously dealing with, but even when thinned out—the cardboard boxes on top plus a couple out of frame are slated for eBay—I still have 2½ cardboard longboxes and 4 shortboxes (center) full of comics and I can't seem to keep from buying more every month. More building to come!

Tagged Comics, Dad, Projects   |   Posted on April 26, 2017 at 10:32pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Exceeding Capacity

I started collecting comics when I was around ten years old. I organized them, tried to keep them in shape, and struggled to find a way to pile them on shelves that didn't warp them or leave them vulnerable to fading and discoloring or random cat frenzies knocking them over and denting them. Eventually, I learned about the existence of longboxes and bought one, but that soon was outgrown and I improvised other boxes that became ugly and unwieldy.

A couple years later my mom was having our kitchen remodeled, so there were carpenters and other workmen in the house a lot, and one day Mom asked them if they could build some kind of cabinet for my mass of comics. (She did this without any prompting from me, too, which is the sort of thing I try to remember about her rather than the ugly alcoholic stuff that came much later.) So they did, and it was OK, but not really ideal -- just kind of a deep shelf unit turned on its end -- and after a time I maxed it out anyway, so one day Mom again said, "why don't we have them make a better one," and I sketched out what would be better. And by the time we moved into a new house not too long after that, I had a pair of long wooden drawer cabinet things that doubled as furniture and storage.

Those things are great, and I still have them today. They held most of my collection for years, with only a couple of longboxes supplementing, but as needed I would get another box and tuck it away somewhere.

My overflow now exceeds what fits in the cabinets.

Now, though, things are out of control again. I occasionally put some comics on eBay and try to thin the mass some, but the incoming stuff always outnumbers the outflow of eBay dumps (and really, I should just put a lot of the chaff in some bundles and sell it for pennies if I really want to make space), and my library room is in a constant state of disarray. I've cleaned it up some of late and tried to organize, but the conclusion is that, since I can't seem to muster up the will to sell off half my collection, I need more of what my mom suggested for me during her kitchen remodel.

But I'm a grown-ass man now (allegedly; I mean, this is about thousands of comic books) and I don't need to hire contractors to build things, I can do it myself. So I will.

I used The Google and determined that, as expected, my mom was not the only person to conceive of such things and others have built similar units and documented them. One fellow even recorded some of his construction work at the time as well as the finished product. I'm going to come up with something that is a kind of cross between what my mom had made from my teenage sketches and what this "cougarcomics" fellow has done.

I'm putting this up here mostly as a reminder to myself and as a public declaration of intent so I won't blow it off; I don't know when I'll get to it, in some ways I think I should start right away because I have time and I tend to have less work in the winter than the rest of the year. On the other hand, sometime in the next year or so (?) I intend on moving, and do I want to move even more heavy wood furniture than I already have? Maybe better to wait until I'm in a new place. But, who knows, it might take longer to find a place to move to, and in the meantime the problem continues, and when I do move, I'll have a lot of stuff still in these crappy cardboard boxes that could get dropped or dented or whathaveyou. So ... probably ought to do it sooner.

 

Tagged Comics, Projects, Mom   |   Posted on December 4, 2016 at 9:58pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet