Hard Cover Addiction

So I am at work today and my job involves a lot of time on a phone. Sometimes that means just being on hold waiting for the other person to get on the line or whatever. Of course I use that invaluable down time to check the various websites for any new comic news. Lo and behold today Marvel releases an announcement on their October Masterworks volumes. Now this week I had just purchased the $75 archive of Dr. Fate, yet I knew immediately that I would be getting both of these Masterworks (which means I will all 85 Masterworks at that time).

This caused me to start pondering how bad my addiction to these hard cover collections has become. I buy these collections and seldom get around to even sitting down and reading them. The plastic is still on a few of them!

Oh when it was just Masterworks and Archives the getting one hard cover every other week or less was not a big deal, but now between, Masterworks, Omnibus, Premier, Deluxe, Absolute editions that the big 2 are putting out the amount of material coming home in hard cover is getting nuts. Add to that the EC Archives, Dark Horse Archives that have been done, plus the various trades and I have hardly had a single week without a collected edition in my purchases.

I have to really try and rethink what I'm getting and will have to be more judicious in my taste of what I buy as further solicitations continue. The deeper Marvel goes into the Golden Age the easier it will be for me to skip a Masterworks and DC has made it easier as after the first couple volumes of some golden age Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Plastic Man I found skipping those volumes very easy.

Still the temptation is very strong and I still dream of a time when I will sit down and read through all of these books. I mean how much fun will it be to read Avengers #1-75 in Masterworks over the span of a few weeks or sit down and check out the Golden Age Dr. Fate.

I have kicked owning the floppies habit and manged to mail all of the monthly issues to family and friends (the only book I'm holding onto a copy for myself is Black Summer as I worry that Avatar may never be able to collect it in a format that I like). So maybe I can ratchet down my hard cover purchases and buy them at a later date or skip them all together. At least I skip the small hard covers (six issue or smaller ones) for most books and wait for a more comprehensive format. I refuse to buy the six issue hard cover of All Star Superman and will hold out for an Absolute.

All in all I have a great hard cover collection and it is prominently displayed in my living room, so it is a collection that gets to see the light of day (unlike the long box collections in basements every where), but still I need to get tougher about what I buy, as the market has gone insane in hard covering anything that breathes.