Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Trades Are Nice, But Sometimes I Prefer Single Issues

I mentioned on Saturday that I've been considering trying to convert my existing comic collection to trades. Most of the stuff I own in single issues exists in some collected edition or another. But I generally dislike double-dipping. Having spent the money to buy them once, why buy them again?

Which isn't to say I don't do that on rare occasion, but it's usually a special case. Last week, I picked up 10,000 Clowns, the trade of Beechen and Breyfogle's stories in Batman Beyond Unlimited. Earlier this year, it was that Rocket Raccoon/Groot collection, even though I owned pretty much all of it except each characters' earliest appearance. But that's about it.

I mentioned there were two other reasons I haven't gone for it. One is there are still space issues. Going with trades means I'm looking for shelf space instead of box space, but it doesn't make much difference otherwise. The other reason is something where I consider single issues to have a decided advantage. If I buy a trade, I'm stuck with all the issues it contains. This isn't always a problem, but with more recent, more decompressed stories, it becomes one. Because you get entire issues, sometimes more than one, where very little happens across a single six-issue story. With single issues, I can easily excise those non-factors from the collection. That's how I go from 120 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man to roughly 40. I chopped out all of Bendis' chaff.

With a trade, I can't do much about it,. Unless I want to mangle the nice paperback or hardcover collection I went to all the trouble to purchase by ripping out entire chapters. The nice thing about single issues is I can prune selectively.

Those two trades I mentioned above were a rare case where the roles were reversed. Buying 10,000 Clowns gave me the Batman story I wanted, without all the JT Krul/Howard Porter Superman stuff I so disliked. The Rocket Raccoon/Groot collection let me keep their stories from the two Annihilators' mini-series, without the actual Annihilators stories. It's the same principle, just working the opposite way because the material was originally in anthologies.

I don't have any objection to trades otherwise, really. When I want all the material they contain, they're perfectly fine, and whether I buy them or the single issues depends on which comes cheaper. But that flexibility the single issues provide comes in handy sometimes.

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