If you talk to someone who collects comics, one thing they would likely admit is that space? Meaning the room they have for their comics?

It’s the true enemy.

It isn’t at first, of course. You start modestly, building your collection through single issue comics, trade paperbacks, graphic novels, manga, or whatever draws your interest. You love it. You want more, so you get more. But then it just continues to grow. It continues to grow and it continues to grow and it continues to grow, until one day you look around the room these varying tomes reside in and realize, “I’m out of space.”

That’s somewhere I’ve been for a while. Even though my decently sized home office offers quite a bit of real estate for my comics, graphic novels, and related materials, its limits are constantly being tested. And it’s not (only) because I’m a serial purchaser or something. Each week brings new packages of comics in from different publishers, 18 and when you add that to my expansive buy piles, it becomes a lot. Too much even.

So, what does one do when faced with endless waves of comics coming in and none going out, all housed in a room that’s packed enough the producers of Hoarders are considering doing an entire episode on you?

There are an array of possible answers, but my preferred one is hosting comic book garage sales. That makes sense if you know me. While it is often said that comics journalists and podcasters aspire to create their own comics, I’ve never had that desire. Instead, I have always wanted to run a comic shop. And creating a pop-up comic shop at my home every summer or two solves one problem — what to do with all those pesky comics — while offering me a taste of the job I’ve always wanted in the process.

This year’s edition was another successful entry in this tradition. It took place on a weekend back in September, and it found 40+ customers and assorted other visitors stopping by across the two days and seven hours my shop was open. It did exactly what I needed it to do. I sold over five long boxes worth of single-issue comics as well as dozens of graphic novels, to say nothing of assorted Pokémon and Magic the Gathering cards that have stayed with me for multiple decades now. 19 Space needed to be cleared, and it was. My office suddenly had a little room to breathe.

It took a lot of work to get there. These events are a useful reminder that as fun as owning a comic shop could be, it would also be exhausting. That was true even of my extremely basic one. While the setup for the event is much more than what you’d expect it to be — organizing everything, deciding which comics to include and which ones I want to keep, 20 and then moving everything to the garage is both mentally and physically taxing when it involves almost 40 full long boxes — the shop’s open time was incredibly brief. And once I closed, I was closed, not to reopen for at least another year. More than that, I didn’t have to do any of the hard parts of a retailer’s job, like ordering new comics, checking in inventory, managing systems, or anything like that. It was basically the easy and fun parts of running a comic shop and nothing else.

And I was still dead to the world afterwards.

Much of the reason for that was all the multi-tasking the job asks of you. Especially as an occasionally solo operation, 21 I wasn’t just taking payments from people but counting comics, answering questions, walking people through how the garage sale worked, negotiating, reordering boxes, and anything else you could imagine. And the customer management side was a huge part of what made the job, if only because every person seemed to want something a little different.

Varying X-Men titles? Comics written by James Tynion IV? Skottie Young covers? Golden Age, Silver Age, or Bronze Age issues? 22 You name it. Someone asked for it. There was even one person disappointed to learn that I did not have any hentai. Each person carried their own wants and desires into my shop, and it resulted in an eclectic mix of requests from these temporary denizens of my garage. But the one thing that united them was that most of these individuals were, as one woman who stopped by put it, “men on a mission.”

Above all, that mission was one of hope. They were fueled by a dream that comic fans of a certain variety share when they come across a comic collection. You probably know what I mean. When you’re faced with a sea of long boxes, the possibilities are endless. Anything could be in there. If you find the right collection, unknown treasures may be waiting, whether you’re talking key comics 23 that slipped through the cracks or issues that just speak to you as a person. Could these comics be found in my garage during those two days? Maybe. Maybe not.

But you never know until you look.

And that’s where the magic lies for this type of comic fan.