Anyway, as of last week I have finally begun the project that I've been putting off for 25 years: merging all of the comics into a single run, then separating them into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Maybe. (Maybe == "think about it again in a later pass") The goal for this pass is 10% Keep, 50% Discard, and 40% Maybe. So far, a couple of boxes in, I'm at least within spitting distance of those targets.
I'm mildly amused that I can get most of the way there by applying the simplest and dumbest of all metrics: do I actually *remember* this story? If I don't remember it at all, then odds are it wasn't good enough to be worth keeping. A truly prodigious fraction of the Marvel and DC of the past 40 years fail that cut, which is why I've dropped DC entirely and am steadily trimming back the Marvels. I mean, sure, some of the comics were just *bad*, and those are easy to discard, but it's depressing to realize how many were such cotton candy that they left no impression whatsoever.
Anyway, the sorting proceeds apace, and next week I should hopefully be able to start the other half of the project, the part that has delayed this so long -- inventorying the whole mess so I can begin to sell the discards. I will, of course, be doing that in Querki: it's a delightful little stress-test of the system. (My usual offhand guide to the maximum size of a Querki Space is 50,000 Things, and I've always been clear that this is in order to be large enough to hold all my comics. It's arbitrary but makes sense to me, the same way the size of a CD was chosen to be large enough to hold Beethoven's 9th.) Then I just have to figure out the most practical way to sell it...
