I have been forced to assess my comic book collection. I am in the process of moving. Now, I hate moving. It is such a pain in the ass. But, I’m tired of the suburbs and my generic 1970’s ranch and am headed toward an urban neighborhood with a big old 1902 Victorian home. It is pretty cool, because you just don’t find this kind of home back where I grew up in Miami.
At any rate, the biggest headache is moving my comic book, toy, video game and sports memorabilia collections. I just finished moving my comic books out and I packed them up in a total of 47 long boxes. Now, I know that there are tons of people that have larger collections than that, but for me, that is lots to pack up and move. While packing my comic book collection away, I realized that I have been terribly slack in organizing and keeping track of my collection.
I can’t bring myself to pay for a program to inventory my comic book collections, so I have looked for a way to keep an inventory of my comic book collection using a free service. I actually found a website, itaggit.com, and discovered that I can keep an inventory for each title I collect online. It is a pretty new site and they seem intent on marketing to us comic book fans. You can also choose to share your collection with the public and link it up to various blogs.
Personally, I’ll probably just use it to keep an inventory of my collection and keep it private. At any rate, I’ve found itaggit.com a pretty cool way to finally get a proper inventory of my collection. If you are looking to inventory your collection you might want to give itaggit.com a try.
Has anyone else taken on this endeavor to catalog and track their collection? Or are most people like me and totally slack off and just store your comic books in long boxes with no rhyme or reason? Seriously, for the longest time, all I have done is once I finish reading an issue, I bag and board it and then put it in a long box. I don’t have the titles sorted in any fashion in the long boxes at all.
However, I figure that when I unpack into my new house, that this will be as good a time as any to go through all the long boxes, take an inventory and put the titles in order. I cannot imagine how long it is going to take me to slog my way through 47 long boxes. I’m so not looking forward to this task.
8 thoughts on “Comic Book Collecting: Cataloging Your Collection”
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I bit the bullet and bought comicbase last year at wizard world chicago. I tried some online sites prior to that and usually had issues with collection size. I have found a charity to whom I can donate books, so cataloging my inventory was key for documentation purposes. I still haven’t gotten everything, but I am getting there.
I like comicbase because a lot of the things I would want to know (storyline, creative talent, cover price, etc.) is already there, and you can download weekly updates to the database.
Good luck with the inventory!
My only advice is not to let any women in your life anywhere near them. It’s sexist but true and I can prove it.
A few months ago, we went to visit my mother up in Oregon. As all it ever does there is rain, I thought to myself that it would be the perfect time to caloge all the old long boxes I had left there when I went off to college. I kept them neatly in my closet, with a big sign that said “Ilan’s comics: Touch and Die” not at all subtle I didn’t thing. And yet, knowingly risking their death, someone had removed most of them. When I asked my mother about it, the response was as follows.
Mom “Oh, I gave them to goodwill years ago.
Me: Whatthenoyoudidnt
Mom: Come on, you’re an adult now, you don’t need comic books.
Me: You better hope you never need a kidney.
I should add the the value of those could have paid off my student loan. Now all I had left were a couple of boxes she missed under my bed. Still, I decided to make the best of it and went to work, which my wife decided to help me with. This entiles several hours of the following
“Oh my goodness, what is she wearing. That comic book is nt apoorate for a Jewish home.”
And most comic books are in fact not modest for a Chassidic Jewish home.
In the end, all I had left was some silver age treasures, which I dutifully put into a shoebox. I went out for a bit, and when I came back I found my daughter eating them. Yes she had them all around her, torn to shreds and eating the pages. My wife says it’s what babies do, but I have my doubts.
So In all, my entire childhood comic book collection was destroyed by three generations of women. I’m not sure how that’s helpful to you, I just felt like ranting. Enjoy the move.
I’ve recently started cataloging my comics through Comic Collector Live. It is a program that runs on your computer and accesses a database of comic books. There are comic covers and some arc comments to single issues. It’s a nice program that I hope continues to be updated.
Good luck with your cataloging!
I also use comic collector Live. I like the fact their large database of covers and story arcs helps me decide which are the best comics to keep. You can add new titles and it’s pretty helpful with a lot of nice features, just started using it a few months ago but I have no complaints.
In terms of long box storage, I just store everything alphabetically.
For keeping track of what items are in my collection, I go low-tech: alphabetized lists of trade paperbacks and single issues on a WordPerfect file (I don’t know if WordPerfect is used in the USA, so the comparable product would be Microsoft Word). It’s simple, but it gets the job done (I have all my books catalogued in a similar fashion).
I run off hard copies every so often (once a year, if that; I should probably do that now, actually) to keep a reasonably up to date list.
I currently use an online program called mycomicpile.com. I found I can easily organize my books into sub-collections (piles) that mirror how/where my comics are stored. Not only do a have a fair assessment of how many books I have, I get their values, their profit margin, and their location.
The only drawback is getting the information out in a decent manner for hard-copy purposes(insurance). Otherwise, I like this one.
Wow, 47 boxes! That is insane. In the last 2 years of collecting, I’ve often wondered what I would do with my comic book collections. I guess eventually I’ll want to sell them because as you noted and I’m finding out, there isn’t a great place to store them. You have to keep them away from damaging places which pretty much leaves in the house as your only option. Maybe one of these days I’ll buy a store where I can sell comics and keep the ones I own inventoried. That sounds like a pretty cool system that not only keeps up with them but shows prices updated weekly. You could put a terminal like that in your store and not have to worry about price tagging anything. Hmm… one could dream right?