Tracy Empathy

I just started reading ME's next-to-most-recent book, Wertham Was Right, a collection of essays on various topics, many comic-book related and all hilarious. The first essay in the book is about a woman named Tracy who once worked for him. One of her tasks was to file his comic books. Anyone who thinks comics are for kids should take one look at the numbering systems on comics. No medium intended for children would randomly insert Issue #0 into the 500's, and at equally random intervals restart the numbering on a title so that Spiderman #1 is several entirely different comics.

Reading about Tracy's troubles with filing ME's comics called to mind the first time I tried to organize Elie's comic book collection. At the time, we had been together for just a couple months, and he was at work one night when I got the brilliant idea to surprise him by organizing his comic book collection. So that seemed like a good idea at the time. At the time, it was organized archaeologically in a green Rubbermaid about the size of a bathtub, back when it would fit in something the size of a bathtub. I figured you take the Batman comics and go 1-whatever, then move on to the Superman comics and stack them 1-whatever, and so on. Ah, silly, silly, naive me. That was right about the time I found out that there are something like 400 Batman series and no two comics in that entire tub had consecutive issue numbers. Several hours later, I surrendered. Organizing by title turned out to be prohibitively difficult, so I gave up and decided to just sort them out by superhero.

That would have worked, too, if it weren't for the damn crossovers. I wasted more energy trying to decide if Superman meets Wonder Woman should go in the Superman stack or the Wonder Woman stack. To top it all off, later I found out that Azrael, Agent of the Bat is sort of part of Batman. Yup, just try organizing even a small comic book collection and see if you still think these are meant for kids. Trust me, the kids have given up on following comics and are hacking your V-chip. It's easier.