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Rent doubles more rapidly than minimum wage does. This affects people many ways, including the manner in which they keep or dispose of possessions. As real estate, both rental and purchased, becomes more dear, the cost of keeping stacks and piles of anything - from clothes to bicycles to books to pictures of one's ancestors - becomes higher. Some people cope by keeping their possessions in mini-warehouse type storage units. Others cope by getting rid of more stuff.
Sometimes the new scarcity and crowdedness impose sacrifices; and such sacrifices can include the maintenence of a large comics collection.
Burning seems a typically unpleasant way of disposing of comics. Although comics burn easily (particularly paleocomics printed on old-fashioned newsprint), they don't necessarily smell good in the process; furthermore, they may emit a rich vocabulary of toxic substances as they kindle. More importantly, burning comics destroys them for the next reader. Reserve this strategy for comics that have done something so awful that incarceration proves a completely inadequate remedy.
Shredding also does wrong to the hopeful next owner of a comic. It leads little readable page, although an inheritor lucky enough to retrieve all the pieces could theoretically reassemble them as hardcopy (or electronically, as scholars eventually did with the shredded remnants of the Dead Sea Scrolls). Shredding, though also a terrible thing to do to a comic, at least allows a few methods to make it interesting. Manual shredding provides a reliable, if less colorful, approach. Most softbound comics yield readily to the power of human muscle as applied by even the youngest readers. Mechanical shredding, however, provides a more entertaining experience, with the machine doing most of the work and providing excellent confetti, particularly with color comics used as a source. Unfortunately, mechanical shredders balk at the staples that join a conventional comic, so the would-be destructor of a comic must remove the offending bits of wire first. Furthermore, shredding by machine may require the disassembly of the book into single-page sections more suited to the capacities of the machine. For my own part, the only comics I shredded went into an Atlas Mercato Pasta Maker machine, a hand-cranked device that turns pasta dough into fettucine strips or slightly curly spaghetti, depending upon the settings and attachments used. This clever device shreds single-page items, devoid of staples, fairly reliably. I chose to Dispose of Secret Wars II #1 in this manner (because I read it and decided it deserved it) and some awful no-name black-and-white book on glossy paper that depicted an after-the-fall scenario where gangsters in Mad Max garb patrolled the ruins compelling female victims to provide them sexual favors, then slaying them (thereafter I became more cautious about the impulse purchases I made from ten-cent bins).
Other methods also offer little to commend themselves. Throwing comics in the street has two major downsides: the destruction of the books in question and the pollution of the street by the litter that results. Less than the former method can I recommend bundling the offending books and tossing them into the nearest body of water; perhaps some fisherman in Oklahoma might swear by this as a method of baiting for catfish, but I have yet to meet this fisherman.
In short, though, I would label as "bad" those methods of disposing of comics that involve the destruction of the books because someone might still get something out of the comics. One might see more promise in methods that pass the comics on to someone else who might find some use for them.
Auctions seem to promise much to those who want to connect items they have to sell with people who might want to buy them. The Internet and World Wide Web, after all, allow us to connect in ways impossible twenty years ago: In 1980, few people could sit in their own homes and enjoy the kind of contact with individuals from practically any place accessible with telephone connections. Online auctions, however, do have drawbacks that become more obvious in the doing. The procedures can involve many steps that computer novices or newbies might find obstructive. The bidding procedures can make the whole rite maddeningly unpleasant. Furthermore, sometimes no one wants to pay what you ask for something.
Other methods of selling leave you with two major obstacles to overcome. First, you probably won't find anyone willing to pay anything like what you paid for comics. You probably shouldn't expect anyone to pay 10% of cover price except for the occasional ultrarare collectors' item. Secondly, you might spend so much in time and energy trying to find someone willing to buy (especially in bulk) that you'd do better, money-wise, to resort to one of the bad strategies listed above. However, this article intends to recommend no such wasteful strategy, even if the author has not always led well by example here.
Giving them to people you know has some promise. Generally you have some idea of the tastes of folks once you know them, and may identify someone as a good target to whom to donate comics. Sometimes, though, they'll do just the things you could have with the books, including selling them (for however many pennies on the dollar, or even pennies per pound) or will just throw the things away.
Between 1967 and 1983, I tried various ways of disposing of comics that didn't interest me any more. For that particular collection, the ultimate solution appeared in the form of storing them in a mini-warehouse unit, where burglars/vandals took care of whatever I had there in the mid-eighties. However, aside from trading - which assumes enough people with enough interesting comics in enough proximity to make it work - no method of disposal of comics has offered any real satisfaction.
Moving ahead to the present, or at least the more recent past, I found revelation in the notions presented in one of the Cheeksrant columns at the Cheeks, the Toy Wonder page. Mentioned essentially as an aside in a column about the vileness of some comics fans on some message boards and in some chat rooms, a project came to light. Cheeks, it seems, in conjunction with some accomplices (possibly peers from H.E.A.T., but possibly individuals less personally attached to the Green Lantern contraversies), intended to assemble and donate some 3,600 comics to children's hospitals and summer camp programs.
I liked the sound of this; I wanted to get in on it. So I sent a few (perhaps a few too many) emails to both Cheeks and AirWave, the two principal contacts for donations for this project. My request, alas, postdated the completion of the project by almost a year. AirWave reported a success on many levels: the donees appreciated the effort, and the donors assembled no less than eight thousand comics for the donations to various programs and hospitals.
This, then, provides the inspiration for an upcoming similar - nay, copycat - effort on my part. I already have the materiel: several hundred comic books I can mail, without regrets, to children's hospitals and/or summer camp programs. Accumulating the comics themselves, and culling them out of the overflowing boxes and piles into categories like keep and donate, didn't require all that much effort.
Consistent with AirWave's description of the project, the real effort lies in finding folks to donate to. But I haven't even begun the real work here. In coming months, I'm going to research possible recipients for some humble four-color largesse, starting with the MDA summer camps programs (which, if I recall correctly, operate in various places around the country, providing more local targets).
This project has just begun, so the time hasn't yet come to start sending huge moldering boxes of Jughead comics. The possibility exists that in the age of the four-dollar comic book, very few individuals will care to let go of their overpriced slicks, and nothing of the illogical or immoral attaches to holding on to your books.
However, for those of you who actually read this column and do have comics to dispose of this way, in coming months I will post information returned by my research. Please stand by as details become available. I want to keep the ball rolling that Cheeks, AirWave, and their unnamed but noble co-contributors started.
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