Taking care of your Comics: Part One

I started early on reversing the comics in bags with taping the lip at the bottom. This has been the most effective way for me to protect comics and put them in boxes.
In the early years there were no comic boxes that you could buy at a comic book store. I went to my local grocery store and got their Chicken fryer boxes. They had lids, wax lined, and were the exact size to stand up two rows of comics and fill the box. Keep in mind, they stunk bad and needed to be cleaned up before use. I cleaned them out with Clorox bleach and set them in the sun to dry and they were perfect. There was only one drawback, they were extremely heavy but held 500 comics. I was young and didn’t have a problem lifting them. On the subject of putting in the bag upside down: I never had dogears like you have when you put them in with the tape at the top. Before boxes and for shelf storage I would lay them flat and reverse every copy the opposite way. The reasoning behind this is the following: Try stacking about 50 comics the same way and watch all the left sides curl up. By reversing this every book stayed straight. Early on, the only bags you could get were made of polyethylene which was found to be horrible for paper products, so along came polypropylene which was much better. Eventually there came Mylar and Mylites, the preferred way for collectors to store their comics along with acid free backing boards and boxes. Don’t forget correct place to store them remains a cool dry climate (AKA, A dark closet).

J. Brazell