Have Trades Killed Comic Collecting?
How things have changed. When I started collecting comics as a very young wee lad, part of the joy of it was re-reading my collection. There was this glee to searching through the long boxes and pulling out an entire series and diving back into it. After a while, as the collection grew larger and larger, finding a particular run became more difficult. I started cataloging my collection, keeping like-minded series in the same longbox until that series grew too large and I would need to rejig the storage of what series was kept where. I have a complex coding system to finding my comics, estimating their value and keeping track of my collection. Trades changed that. As sales of trades (collected editions of story arc in paperbook or hardcover format) grew, so did the number of them being put out. At a certain point, most of my favorite runs I had collected were being represented in tradebook format. And here is where collecting comics changed for me. In the old days, I wo...