MaltyBlog #6: Shelved

When you are a comic book collector to the extent I am, you have a big problem to tackle: storage. Comic books take up a lot of space, and the classic long boxes just don’t appeal to me anymore. I found a cheap and easy solution that works perfect for me, makes getting to what I want to read easier, and just looks damn cool! Let’s talk shelves.

The way I have decided to store my comic books isn’t going to work for everyone. It will all depend on the size of the collection and personal preferences. I took some inspiration from Brodie’s basement in the 1995 film Mallrats.

While it’s not exactly the same as what I did, it’s similar. I’d love to know where they got those white holders for those comic books standing upright on his shelves, but for now my set up is quite nice in my opinion.

Seeing all of the colors of the comics peaking out and tabs all lined up really appeals to me. Selecting something to read is also super easy. No longer do I have to sort through boxes, or move boxes to get into other boxes. I tried the long boxes once that were drawer style, but they just didn’t feel right to me at all. So shelved and tabbed it was. Tabs by the way were a very cheap solution and it only required 3 things.

A trip to my local office supply store, and a few dollars later, I had the items I needed to make shelving my books easy. The tabs are peel and stick and can be used multiple times (more on that in a minute), the colored dots gave me enough different colors to cover the main big publishers (Marvel, DC, etc.) and a simple sharpie pen (though any pen will do).

I chose red for Marvel, blue for DC, green for IDW, and yellow for Dark Horse. These are the main publishers I collect for at the moment. I do have books from other publishers, and for those I just use a colored sharpie for now to make other colored ‘dots’.

As you can see in this example, a tab was created for Scarlet Witch, Vol. 3. Two red dots placed on either side, and the title and year written in between. Then it is placed on the back of the book exactly 2 inches down from the top of the board. I do this for every tab, that way everything looks even as your eyes glance across the shelf. Also as noted earlier, these tabs are reusable a few times, so if I should have issue #2 as the earliest issue for a title, and I find #1, I can simply remove the tab from one and put it on the other. Neat! Plus the books are bagged and boarded so there is no damage to the books whatsoever.

As my collection grows, so will the amount of shelves I will need. Realistically, I know I will eventually need some boxes as I will run out of room for shelves. That day is a long way out though, so for now I will enjoy my set up the way I currently have it. In a few years however, who knows? This is just one the things that makes collecting fun for me, and also satisfies my organizational OCD’s lol.

See y’all in a couple days for MaltyMonday!

Till Next time, be good to each other and Game On!

~ Malty

Each blog post will end with a random Music Video, because TMG ❤’s MvM