Stories Within Stories

Organizing comics isn’t just rearranging a horde of single issues for some. It’s revisiting your past and the story behind each of them.

There’s a part in Stephen Frears’ 2000 film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity I’ve always related to. John Cusack plays a record store owner named Rob Gordon, and when he’s reorganizing his records one day, one of his employees stops by his apartment for a visit. The employee, a deep, deep record nerd played by Todd Louiso, observes the records and quickly attempts to figure out how his boss is organizing them.

“Chronological?” he guesses, with a swift negative in return. “Not alphabetical…” he softly says to himself, before his boss just comes out with it.

“Autobiographical.”

Cusack’s Rob, a successful man child who understands things better than he does people, 8 easily could be a comic book fan of a certain age, and I mean that in a sincere and not dismissive way. To anyone who truly loves any type of entertainment medium, there’s a logic to them that people themselves often lack. When you put on a Fleetwood Mac album or watch Aliens or open that collection of the X-Men event X-Tinction Agenda, you know what will be waiting for you: a wonderful experience loaded with memories connected to previous times you engaged with them.

While I’m not sure I could organize my comics autobiographically as Rob does in the movie, I understand the idea behind it because like his records, many of the comics I own have a story behind them. There’s the story they have and my story with each of them, eternally tethered together like the pages of the comics themselves. Take the spinner rack I have in my home office as an example.

You might think that The Avengers #1 is there simply because it’s old and cool, and the same for the copies of X-Men #101 or Uncanny X-Men #141 that are there. You might see Infinite Crisis #4, West Coast Avengers Annual #2, and Nonplayer #1 and think to yourself, “Well, David clearly used a roulette wheel to decide which issues should be highlighted there.” But each comic on it is there because of a personal connection, a story that leaps off the pages into my own life.

The Avengers #1 reminds me of a family trip we took to Washington state when I was a kid, during which we visited an antique store – as we often did in my youth – when I came across a copy of this comic for $10, my exact allowance, a find that nearly made me pass out on the spot. 9 I think of standing up on a stool in my childhood home when I search my memories of X-Men #101, as I snuck through my parents’ bedroom in pursuit of Christmas presents and discovered #101 and #120 hidden in their closet. The stories go on and on: a day at an antique store with my buddy Brandon, the first single-issue comic I bought after getting back into reading them, one of the stories that made me fall in love with the medium, etc. etc.

The past couple years – obviously excluding this pandemic riddled year – I’ve had comic book garage sales at my house, as I look to reduce the size of my frankly unwieldy comic book collection. While I included an immense number of comics in those garage sales, some of which floored the customers who stopped on by, 10 there was a considerable collection I left behind in my office. And it wasn’t value or esteem or the long-term future of each title that guided my decisions to hold onto them, but those connections to my own life and fandom. I don’t keep the comics I should; I keep the comics that mean something to me, even if they mean nothing to anyone else. 11

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to dive into this world again because it was organization time. I’m off on a month-long staycation, and because of how I’m wired, my time is used productively because that’s how I’m built. And as much as I hate bagging and boarding comics, 12 I love organizing them because it gives me an opportunity to revisit these stories I love and what they mean to me. While it doesn’t necessarily have the same oomph to it when it’s all newer comics, as the memories behind those are fresher, I love it all the same.

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  1. Except when it comes to how they’ll respond to The Beta Band’s “The Three EPs.”

  2. I mean that legitimately. I was trembling as I went up to the cash register, hopeful the person behind it wouldn’t recognize the grave mistake they were making.

  3. “Are you sure you want to sell this?!” was a regular question.

  4. This is how you end up with a collection that is mostly X-Men and X-Men related comics, Christopher Priest and M.D. Bright’s Quantum & Woody series, Impulse’s one solo series, all of Bone, Y the Last Man and Chew, and more Gen13 comics than I care to admit.

  5. My buddy Brandon loves it, as he claims it’s relaxing. He is insane in my opinion.

  6. My wife, who is an architect, is contemplating building a custom setup to make it easier for me to access them. That would be a gamechanger.

  7. Particularly in my back, if I’m being honest. Fully loaded longboxes are heavy as hell!

  8. Except when it comes to how they’ll respond to The Beta Band’s “The Three EPs.”

  9. I mean that legitimately. I was trembling as I went up to the cash register, hopeful the person behind it wouldn’t recognize the grave mistake they were making.

  10. “Are you sure you want to sell this?!” was a regular question.

  11. This is how you end up with a collection that is mostly X-Men and X-Men related comics, Christopher Priest and M.D. Bright’s Quantum & Woody series, Impulse’s one solo series, all of Bone, Y the Last Man and Chew, and more Gen13 comics than I care to admit.

  12. My buddy Brandon loves it, as he claims it’s relaxing. He is insane in my opinion.