Method In My Madness...

The "Great Reorganisation" of my comic book collections continues - at a back-breaking, snail's pace. There is some logical method behind my organisational system at present, kind of a cross between chaos magic and The DaVinci Code.

Eventually, obviously, I'd like to get them all in a roughly alphabetical order, but there isn't enough room in the gamesroom to have a separate pile for each title, so I am having to go through all the comics, repeatedly, as I work my way backwards through the alphabet.

No, I don't know why I decided to do it reverse-alphabetical either; clearly it wasn't complicated enough already.

So far I've worked back from Zot! to (various) Teen Titans, but have had to jump back this afternoon when I realised my moronic oversight of forgetting all the X-Men titles!

I also realised yesterday that I have been collecting comics for almost 30 years. Steve got me hooked when I was about 15. Prior to that I had read American comics, and British reprints of them, but my main hording love was 2000AD which I had followed from issue one.

Once I got a job, when I was 18, I'd reckon over 50 per cent of my monthly income would go on comics and games. As I grew older and moved out of my parents' house, into my own, my comic book collection became very ordered; filling almost an entire room of the three-bedroom house I shared with a work colleague.

If I hadn't gone through frequent cycles of selling off vast tracts of my comics (and games) to buy more comics (and games), I hate to think how large my gamesroom would have to be to accommodate all the material that passed through my collection.

Yes, I yearn to reclaim the epic runs of Superman (both pre- and post-John Byrne's mid-80s reinvention of Kal-El), Batman, Conan etc, as well as countless long-forgotten mini-series, but what's done is done.

Everything stayed very organised, even when I went to university (aged 28) and all my worldly goods got shipped back to my parents' attic. I still made the pilgrimage, every holiday, up into the loft space to keep the collection all neatly organised, if not alphabetically, at least grouped by title.

Then, when I fell ill in 2005, I no longer had the energy - or concentration - to make those trips and order collapsed.

Which brings us up to date, and I'm having to go through a mess of half-organised and half-chaotic comic book titles in the naive hope that eventually they'll be in some sort of order.

It's going to be a long project...