"Just Let It Be"

I had thought about reorganizing my comic book collections. Back when I was a teenager, I kept each company seperate for handy access to any particular issue. But...that's really problematic. Because, back then you see, I didn't keep my comics stored in "long" boxes, but had, instead, each title stacked seperately upon shelves. They weren't in any alphabetical order, either. The metal shelves were usually about 5 tiers tall and wide enough that I could put 5 or 6 titles on each. So a typical shelf might consist of seperate stacks of, say, Fantastic Four, Spider-man, The Avengers, Daredevil, X-men, and Sgt. Fury. Or, another shelf might have Justice League, Superman, Action, Adventure, Batman & Detective.

If I only had enough books to make a healthy stack of comics of some company, I'd just stack them altogether in order, like maybe a stack of Harvey, or Towers, or ACG.

But...that was back then, and over the years I learned it was better on the comic's spines NOT to stack them such, and went to storing them vertically instead in boxes that are designed for that purpose. And that's when I went to the system of alphabetical filing. Now, that's okay too, IF you only have 5 or 6 boxes of comics; NOT if you have 40+ boxes. Say you want an issue of Zorro, and you have 8 boxes across stacked at least 5 high, well...that's a LOT of lifting and moving around, especially in a tight storage area just to get to some specific issue you want, as well as making it difficult to insert new additions to your collections.

So's...I get the idea here lately that maybe I want to at least go back to seperating the books by company again. Leave them in alphabetical order, but have nothing in some boxes but DC's, some Marvel, etc. This has it's problems too.

There are so many titles that began being published by one company, then discontinued and picked up by another company retaining its numbering sequence. For example, Tarzan was started by Dell, then Gold Key, then DC. If you sperated by companies, that title would have to be in three different places. A title such as The Phantom was started by Gold Key, then King Comics, then Charlton. Once again, three different places. God help you on some of the Disney-type books such as Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, or Walt Disney's Comics & Stories using a seperate company system of filing. You'd start off with Dell, then Gold Key, then Whitman, then Gladstone, then Gemstone, then Disney, etc., etc.

Yet another problem here is that you'd have to have just a misc. box of sorts for those companies that published only 1 to 10 comics at all, such as M.F. Enterprizes, or Lightning. Even Skywald probably didn't publish more than 10 actual comics.

So what did I finally decide? You guessed it. Just leave them as they are and say the heck with it and save my poor ol' aching back the pain of moving those heavy boxes.