Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Back Issues


Boo. I should write more. At the moment, I am subtlety starving myself to have food as a reward for writing this. I got home from work about half an hour ago, and already mowed through some for the usual prattle of my internet reading.

I was working on back issues today. For those who don't know, back issues are old editions of comic books. Most of the ones in specialty shops have them in clear plastic bags with a white card board backing, to keep them from being bent. A lot of the times they vary in price from the original cover price to 5, 10, 100s of dollars more. The record for a single comic is somewhere around a million and a half, but that was for the first appearance of Superman.

Still, I was sorting and picking out all the extra ones we had doubles and triples, if not more, of in our current stock. I recently made a fairly through list of some of the more popular ones we were missing. That was an ordeal in and of itself.

The problem of a store's back issue bin, is organization. Granted Spider-Man should be with Spider-Man, but people turn into retards sometimes and just shove things wherever. That's a slight on retarded people. I apologize. Some of the mental deficient people that actually frequent my work are pretty good about putting things back where they belong. It's the mongoloids that can't spare two extra seconds of neuron traffic to put the comic where it's supposed to that annoy me.

Comics are typically arranged alpha/numerically. That's just a fancy way of saying alphabetically by title of the comic, and then with each title numerically by issue number. Every comic has an issue number corresponding to the sequence in which the comic was published. Just because the comic has a 63 on it, doesn't mean it was published in 1963, but rather, it is the 63rd issue of that series. There are 62 issues before it.

So, tonight consisted of reorganizing some of the different sections of the back issues. Making sure they were in the right order. Then removing some of the copies with which we had multiple. And finally, restocking the ones we were missing into the correct spots.

Handling old comics is fairly dirty. My hands felt like they were playing in mud after an hour or so. I like doing it though it makes me tired sometimes. I like looking at the old stuff. It makes me want to read some of the older storylines from my youth or earlier. It almost seems like sometimes, older comics still have a simple quality about them that just want a story. Today, a lot of the comics I see mainly focus on marketing and sales. I don't mind that a comic company wants to make money. I just want them to do it with quality stories, not gimmicks. I want to keep restocking the back issues because people are buying them because of how cool that one issue of something was, not because there are rumors that something about may be made into a movie.

And, for the record, that is not my collect at the top. I think I have more than that.