Astrokitty Comics in Lawrence, KS, where I live

Comics BlogShots posted a useful blog this week with helpful hints about collecting comics. It includes tips for buying, selling, grading, and storing which are especially useful if you’re new to the collecting game or if you have a large collection but haven’t begun organizing it. Go check it out.

I thought I would write a companion piece to point new collectors in the right direction for online and software comic book resources. Let me first express the importance of cataloging your collection. Even if you only have 50 books right now, write them down. As your collection grows, it becomes harder to find things and easier to put issues in the wrong places. I have over 3000 comics with hundreds of different titles and every time I move, my system for organization changes, so it’s nice to have an ordered list to work from. I also have a habit of forgetting whether I put my annuals before or after the regular title and these kinds of problems are easily fixed with a catalog. Spreadsheets work just fine, but there are a number of more convenient and faster ways to do it now.

Comic Collector Live

There are dozens of comic collecting software programs but the one I’ve found most useful is Comic Collector Live. It has a number of really useful features I’ve never seen anywhere else and it’s 100% free. Go to their website, download their program, and start imputing your collection! This is the best program for sorting– you can search your collection by title, publisher, writer, and artist. Now you can actually figure out every issue you own drawn by Frank Miller with one click. You can search by character and see every issue that has Aunt May or Bane or the Bat Mite and you can also search by story arc. I use this feature a lot– you can search gaps and story arcs simultaneously, so it will tell you every issue you’re missing in a line like No Man’s Land or Maximum Carnage. The other thing I love about this program is cover view. You can look at a title in a list or you can actually look at all your covers at once. This is a collaborative project so everyone with the program adds books, cover shots, etc. It’s always growing and it’s never entirely complete, but it’s very close. The only drawback is that it doesn’t keep track of the worth of your issues; it’s purely for organization.

This is a program that loads everything from online at startup so there isn’t a lot of wait time while searching for things. You can keep a wish list of issues you don’t have and the program will actually tell you when another member has them up for sale. You can also sell your own issues if you want, of course. There’s also a web browser with a lot of interesting forums, and it connects with Internet Explorer so you can surf the net without opening another browser.

Comics Price Guide.com

I recommend this site for keeping track of worth. If you don’t want to enter all your books in two programs but you care to know what they’re worth, go with comicspriceguide.com instead of Comic Collector Live. You can still view most covers with this site and it’s still pretty good for keeping everything organized, but you can’t do all the cool searches and it takes a little longer to find titles because of loading time. This one does charge a yearly membership fee if you want to keep more than 150 issues in it. It’s about $60.00 a year, which is worth it so you don’t have to keep looking up all your issues– it updates values daily. However, if you don’t mind looking things up periodically, you can search the site for free.

Comic Book Creator

This has nothing to do with organization, but maybe you’ve been collecting for a while and have been itching to try your hand at writing a comic book yourself. Comic Book Creator is a really convenient, intuitive program for putting a book together. I use it to write my ongoing series Lex the Web Comic and I think it looks quite professional. A lot easier than trying to draw all the panels with Photoshop. Brand new, it’s about $50.00. This program has a lot of pre-made templates of pages with about every configuration of panels you could think of. Draw your own pictures, scan them in, then do the panels, balloons, and text boxes with the software. The normal program is best to do original work and they’ve put out other programs with a lot of clip art and artwork from other comics in case you want to do it for fun and don’t want to draw. There’s a Marvel and an anime program, but remember, of course, if you do that you can’t publish. However, you can use those programs to do original stuff as well– as soon as you import your own pictures, it won’t allow you to use content from the program except balloons, text boxes, panels, etc. It’s entirely legal to publish something made with the program as long as you don’t use copyrighted art.

Hope this helps make life easier for new collectors. It really is easier than it’s ever been.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan