how do you file/organize/box/arrange yr comics

I have one long box that I keep the stuff I want to keep in, and usually sort it by "theme" and then subsorted by title. Like I have all the JLA stuff together, and all the Batman stuff together and all the Marvel stuff together.

Then I have a big green plastic bin where I keep all the throwaways. The green helps accelerate the kitsching process so that I can one day enjoy them through jaded eyes.

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myself i have big stupid piles in big drawers which get mixed up everytime i move. but its kind of nice. a lucky dip.

I got my first ever "real" comics boxes with lids and stuff early this year, and am gradually sifting through the old boxes and trying to sort full runs of things (OH WHERE ARE YOU HIDING, BACCHUS #s 42-44?) and putting good stuff in nice new bags, and vacuuming years and years of dust off the top of other stuff. I have filled four boxes and bought another four this weekend, it's fun finding stuff I forgot about and making piles of it to read.

Mostly stuff by one writer gets kept together, but this isn't hugely practical in all cases. In this big reorganisation, I think Grant Morrison's JLA will stop living with The Invisibles, and take up residence behind the Giffen/DeMatteis JLI. But then it will be displacing the Keith Giffen section, which could go and become an adjunct to the Misc DCU section, but what of The March Hare and Video Jack (and Punx, on the off-chance I find it)?

Perhaps I will report back to this thread in a couple of years when I've finished, to deliver my findings.

Comics with spines, btw, tend to get kept with the same writer much less often, because they have to be stored according to size: yer Gemma Bovaries and Moebius sketchbooks and Gaiman Stardusts need to live on a very tall shelf, but yer Skibber-Bee-Byes and Shutterbug Follies and The Bogie Mans are only wee, so they go on a small top shelf. I used to keep prose books by comics people on the same shelves as comics a lot more, but I ran out of room.

!!!
I just realised! When looking through one lot of CD shelves at mine Gaz identified: "Hey, this is the comics writers section" and I was like "nah, it's the spoken-word section, I just stuck the Dave McKean/Jon J Muth collabo album in between Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore because I couldn't think of a better place to remember it," BUT! Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch have both written comics too! It IS my comics-writers section!

Except that the James Kochalka Superstar CDs live a few columns away. And a compilation with a Grant Morrison techno track lives on the digipaks shelf. Phew.

Is the GM techno track any good?

I found the box with JLA in it last night, and it's not actually with Invisibles after all: there's a few misc things in the front including the Amy Racecar colour special, then Supreme, then JLA, then a divider card for Aztek but as well as including Aztek it also has the Morrison/Millar run on the Flash (including the Green Lantern/Green Arrow crossover issues) and a frankly astounding number of Vampirella comics by Morrison: I knew I'd bought one, but there's eight or so in here! including a Witchblade crossover!! I'm assuming Millar ghosted most of these. Though I also suspect there might be an Alan Moore story in there somewhere.

And for some reason all of Sandman Mystery Theatre is in the back of the box, being very dusty. I'm guessing it was just the right size to prop everything else, as it doesn't fit the time-period or 'geniuses slumming' pattern of the other stuff.

Since I've successfully managed to trash bin most of the comic books that I've ever owned by this point (one of which was a coverless copy of a forties Action Comics-- my second greatest sin against comic book collecting)(sin number one was probably destroying the cover of my copy of the first Steranko History of Comics, sin number three throwing out my run of Chaykin American Flagg!s just because I didn't think I'd want to reread them later), I only have one short box containing the floppies that are officially in the collection these days (nothing in bags at this point). Stuff gets categorized by writer alphabetically and then by series chronologically (so Doom Patrols #19-63 follow Animal Man #26, etc., and Animal Man follows Zot!), except for the Silver Age books, which are sorted alphabetically by series in the back of the box. Then I've got a magazine box half full of stuff that I'm less fond of and thinking of selling/giving away and a stack of recent issues that may or may not be thrown out later on (and my Steve Gerbers are also in this stack, because I ran out of space in the short box). Plus, two bookshelf rows of hardcovers and TPBs organized by author, one for tankoubon-sized books and one for full-sized, and my tabloid-sized 20 Nude Dancers 20 poster book, which is sitting on my apartment floor propped up against the bookcase along with my copy of the gargantuan Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.