Ink & Altruism

My personal history of comic collecting is an erratic tale.

But the short version goes something like this: began in 1982 with a surge of Marvels (“X-Men,” “Daredevil,” “Power Man and Iron Fist”) accompanied by a sprinkle of indies (“TMNT”); the next 15 years led to a gradual drawdown of purchases (of both Marvels and DC) before eventually a sudden falloff of regular visits to my FNCS struck, dramatically reducing my comic buying from a bi-weekly event to something that occurred once a year, if I was lucky.

Today in 2007, I’m back to “weekly” purchases – and though my comic buying still isn’t too heavy, the results of this return to form are quickly cluttering my bedroom (slash) reading chamber.

In the recent past, I solved this problem by weeding out issues I had no further interest in, and recycling them with other scrap paper.

Yet now I’ve come up with a far better solution for culling my swelling hordes of comics, and taken a page from pal Mike (who hands out unwanted comics to trick-or-treaters each Halloween) by donating my orphans to a local homeless shelter which specializes in housing families and children.

Will these donated comics mean a dramatic upswing in the quality of these kids’ lives? Probably not . But anything that encourages them to read—and even better, drive them to continue doing so—cannot be a bad thing.

Thus, if my old copies of “Green Lantern Corps” and “Amazing Spider-Man” can fill that prescription, I’m happy to pass them along.