Reading, Collecting, and the Walking Dead

I blame The Walking Dead.

My wife has long stated her heart-felt intention to read the comics. “Oh, a new one,” she’s said every month for the past eight years. “I love zombies. I should read that.” (Every month. For eight years.)

But it wasn’t until the second season of the Walking Dead TV series on AMC that she asked me to pull the comics out for her. I gave the woop of joy unique to the geek who gets to share the media he loves with the woman he loves, sprang to the comics closet where I keep my longboxes, and realized:

Every month. For eight years. That’s a lot of comics.

I’ve always claimed that when it came to comics, I’m a reader, not a collector. But if you’re reading 5-10 comics a month since 1990 or so, you’re still going to build up quite a collection. And if you’re me (I know you’re not, but since I started this paragraph in second person, I’m feeling committed to it), you haven’t kept them quite as organized as you’d hoped, so finding all 90+ issues of a single series means digging through a lot of comics. I mean a lot a lot. I mean if one of those bookshelves of longboxes tipped over, it would have crushed me.

I found all but one or two of issues of The Walking Dead. It took hours of digging over the course of several days, but I was pleased with the results:

1. My wife is caught up.
2. I’m eyeballing comiXology.

For the uninitiated, comiXology is a service providing electronic versions of comics, especially on your handheld device. You could consider it an iTunes of comics.

If I’m really a reader, not a collector, this should be perfect for me — especially since I (a) now have a handheld device device and (b) am worried those “Hoarders” TV folks are going to start poking around my closets, clucking and tutting like disapproving Geiger counters.

And yet… Every month. For eight years. That’s more than a habit. That’s a tradition. Even if I do follow the future down the e-published rabbit hole, I don’t think I can give up the local comic shop.

I’m too much of a collector.