Grading comics at a con in Portland changed my whole approach to back issues

I used to sort my long boxes by publisher and then by character, thought that was fine. Last summer I had a table at the Portland Retro Comic Expo and a dealer from Seattle watched me flip through a stack of 90s X-Men. He said my method was fine for reading but a mess for selling, then showed me how he files by key issue dates and condition first. That 20 minute talk rearranged how I think about every dollar in my collection. Now I wonder if I am preserving comic fans' habits or just my own stubborn ones. Do you guys organize for your own enjoyment or for potential trade value, and has a store owner or fellow collector ever reset your system mid-convention?

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the_tessa4d ago

I had a guy at Rose City Comic Con in 2019 offer me 40 bucks for a beat up copy of New Mutants 98 that I had stuffed in a dollar box, and that was the day I stopped sorting by what I liked reading first. What nobody really talks about is that grading changed the actual shape of my boxes, not just the order. CGC slabs are a half inch thick and don't fit in a standard bag and board slot, so now I've got a whole separate short box for graded stuff and the raw books live in a different system entirely. That split is the part that messes with your head, because you end up with two collections that don't talk to each other. Your reading copy and your money copy are basically different hobbies that happen to share a logo.

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