Trade Paperback Surplus

One of the good things -- perhaps the only good thing -- about the Chicago Wizard World Comic Convention this year was that it seemed like every other dealer who was there had boxes and boxes of half-price trade paperbacks for sale. One of the things I look for at cons and dealer shows is half-price trades; I came home from Chicago with about a dozen more. (For the uninitiated, trade paperbacks are sometimes originally published stories in a lengthier format, but are most often collections of storylines first published as regular comic books, usually somewhere between four and twelve issues. We even had a discussion while in Chicago about the ideal number of issues to collect into a trade paperback -- these are the kinds of things we talk about.) I've been buying trades for a long time, though I generally prefer reading comics in the traditional 32-page format -- probably more from habit than anything else. Anyway, as I was putting my new purchases away when I got home, I realized that I was running out of room on the shelves where I've been storing my trades. While I don't want to make an accurate count, I'm sure I have well over 100 at this point. I keep buying them, but I don't make time to read them. So, I decided the other day that I should try to read one trade a weekend. If I do that between now and next summer's Chicago convention, I should be able to read about 50 of them. Maybe then I can feel a bit more justified about buying a bunch more.