Elsewhere

Because of my wedding and a few other external factors, I was somewhat less productive on the other sites for which I write this past month or so, and as such I haven't done one of these Elsewhere posts in a while. So, let's see if I can catch up on everything right quick. It's really not much to cover. A few weeks back I wrote a "1987 And All That" column for CSBG about Detective Comics #580-581, a none-too-impressive two-part Two-Face story. More recently on that site, I wrote about the Amazing Spider-Man wedding special, which was also, unfortunately, less then spectacular. Most recently of all, I did a piece for PopMatters about some of the hassles and frustrations I subject myself to by choosing to remain a single issue collector. There, see...just three things after all this time.

As a final, tiny bit of business, this Wired UK article about Wonder Woman's movie costume from last month included, among others, a link to this guest piece my friend and Wonder Woman superfan Meredith generously wrote for me last year. So that was pretty cool.

Something I Failed to Mention
In the PopMatters single issue post, I broke down my behavior into five sections: Collecting, Storing, Culling, Moving, and Reading. There is, though, a sixth piece of the puzzle that I foolishly neglected, and that's Sorting. It goes along with Storing, I suppose (and not just because they're nearly the same word) but really Sorting is its own thing. Every collector organizes their comics differently, and so does every comicbook store, for that matter. People group books by creator, character, year, publisher...basically anything that could be used to categorize the issues is being used by somebody somewhere. Personally, I like to go with straight-up alphabetization by title, but even that can create wrinkles here and there. Like, is it Adventures of Superman, meaning it goes with the A's, or Superman, Adventures of, which puts it with the S's? In that example, I go with the latter choice, if only because it means all the Superman titles are closer together, but part of me thinks I'm cheating, since in my heart I know the Adventures comes first. Then, because there's such an overabundance of them, I keep all of my Batman comics separate from the rest. But this only means series with the word "Batman" in their titles—Detective Comics, for instance, is in with the D's. It's an arbitrary distinction, but one I made a long time ago and have stuck with out of stubbornness, tradition, and laziness. I don't want to have to reinsert the Batman comics into the rest of my collection, nor do I want to pull the Detectives out, because either of those activities would mean reshuffling all the issues of all the books presently on my shelves. Therein lies the connection between Sorting and Storing, which is most likely why I failed to include Sorting in my PopMatters column. Thank goodness I've made up for it now.