On second thought, burn them all

Wordle 647 5/6

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Yesterday I dropped the kid off solo and T. walked to work, her first day at the new job. Cool.

Work was fine. Four meetings but I didn't have to speak in any of them except saying "hello" and "goodbye", if that. In between I sent a couple emails and made a dent in the fourth training. I could have got more done but wasn't too bad.

After posting yesterday's post and through the morning I thought, "Hmmm, maybe I should take an inventory of my comic book collection. That potential buyer was interested. Figuring out what to sell will be hard if I just flip through them, but if I have a list, I can get up to the right number to exactly fill boxes." Smart of me, right? 

Hah fucking hah. The problem isn't organizing them. They were in decent order to begin with, except for the 60-70 I had collected in a pile since the kid was born. The problem was figuring out what they're called, when they were published, and in what series. Some fun facts:

• X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, volume 1, issue 1, published in 2005, and X-Men: Age of Apocalypse One-Shot, volume 1, issue 1, published in 2005 are two different books.
• Volume numbers might seem like an important way to tell one comic from another. Good luck figuring out what they are. They often aren't printed anywhere in or on the book, and Googling will turn up omnibuses long before single issues.
• In the 1990s and 2000s Marvel relaunched a bunch of its long-running, low-selling titles with issue 1s. (This has happened several times.) About 5 years later they thought it would be cool to return to the original numbering, in honor of big milestones or just show off how much history they had. The issue of Fantastic Four published in September 2003 has two numbers on the cover, issue 71 of the current series and 500 of the original series. Same for about a dozen issues of that title around then and several other titles. Which series am I supposed to consider those a part of?
• The "Spider-Man" series started in 1990, and this isn't a reboot; his earlier series had simply had different names. Around issue 75 or so they started calling this "Peter Parker: Spider-Man" on the cover but officially its name was still "Spider-Man". It ended and relaunched in 1999 and the new series officially started with "Peter Parker: Spider-Man", volume 2, issue 1. But that means there was never a "Peter Parker: Spider-Man" volume 1!
• Volume 1 of "Sensational Spider-Man" ran from 1996 to 1998. In 2004 they launched a series called "Marvel Knights Spider-Man", and in 2006 they renamed it to "Sensational Spider-Man" volume 2. So we have a situation similar to the previous, with a volume 2 issue X without a volume 2 issue 1. 

And that's just getting through the letter S. I really dread "Uncanny X-Men", "Astonishing X-Men", Adjectiveless X-Men (never its official name but so well known it might as well be)... And then there's the Ultimate line, which I generally sorted with the main title it was related to but sometimes there's no clear equivalent.

So anyways, I spent about two hours working on that in the afternoon, during and after the last of those meetings. I left at the last minute to get the kid to her guitar lesson. I turned out to be late, partly due to traffic. Fortunately, sort of, the teacher was even later. 

The dinner plan had been a falafel platter, but the hummus was moldy. Good thing we had leftovers! So while T. was in a meeting about school/parenting issues, and the kid read in her room, I spent about an hour working on the collection. Dinner was more lasagna and cucumber salad.

I have a total of 565 titles in the spreadsheet by now. This had better be worth it.