The Completists

One could argue that life is a series of collections. You go through it collecting all the way: family, friends, jobs, stuff, self-esteem, heartache, etc. Of course, only some of the things you collect are worth a damn in the end.

I've been a collector of stuff since I was a little kid. That's a nice way of saying I have "pack rat tendencies." I'm not a hoarder or anything like that, but I do tend to accumulate stuff. This is followed at some point by a purge of stuff I don't need, usually before things get too cluttered.

I used to love reading the comics in the newspaper and would cut out the strips I liked and paste them into scrapbooks. Then I realized you could buy much nicer collections of strips like "Peanuts" in paperback, so that stopped. But I got into hockey and baseball cards at a young age. And later it was comic books, which I collected from age 11 to 21.

I was a hardcore comics nerd. Like pretty much everything I collected, I wasn't in it for some perceived value down the road. I was into them for the stories. Back in the late '70s, comics cost 25 cents an issue; now, the cover price runs around $3 or $4. I was primarily a Marvel guy: Amazing Spider-man, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Hulk, X-Men, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man. As the years went by, I discovered comics specialty shops and store subscriptions, where you could sign up to have the store set aside new issues of the titles you were into. I'd go in once a week to pick up the new comics. There was a feeling of excitement as I brought the books home, although after a while I had to kind of sneak them in so I wouldn't catch crap from my mother about blowing all my spare cash on comics. I invested in mylar bags and cardboard comics boxes to store them in. The collection grew and grew.

Once I got to college, I left them at home because there wasn't room in a small dorm room or apartment for them; plus, I didn't really want people knowing I read them. Comics really weren't cool, so I only had a few friends I ever discussed them with. Once a month, I'd go home to work a couple of night crews at the Market Basket and during the day, I'd go get my big pile of comics and then read as many of them as I could before I went back to school. By the time I graduated, however, I just didn't have the energy or will to read 20+ comics a month, so I just stopped. Cold turkey. And about 10 years later, I sold them all before we bought our house. (In retrospect, I wish I'd held onto some of my more prized comics, because they certainly weren't worth much by the time I sold them. The bottom fell out of the market once eBay came along and everybody sold all their crap.)

And besides, a new collecting obsession had overtaken me: Music. Really, I got into music not too long after I got into comics. The first new album I bought was Supertramp's Breakfast in America and I never looked back. It was a much more socially acceptable thing to collect. At first it was vinyl, until 1989, when I got my first CD player. Now most of my music is purchased in MP3, although I occasionally pick up a CD if it's on sale or something.

I would get into bands the same way I'd get into comic titles. I'd pick up everything by the band and keep buying new albums faithfully. It really wasn't until the last decade or so that I stopped buying everything by a particular artist because I finally admitted to myself that I have every Judas Priest album I need, so there's no need to take a chance on a new album. I don't feel that way about every artist, but certain ones definitely have their peak eras. The last Stones album I bought was 1989's Steel Wheels and even that is kinda iffy. The nice thing about digital music is if you can get an MP3 or two to sample a new release; if it doesn't do it for you, at least you're not out $10+. Being a completist can be fun, but it can also be tiring and expensive.

It's a lot easier to take a completist approach to TV viewing nowadays, especially now that most shows are available in their entirety on DVD or via Netflix streaming or On Demand. I love how you can blow through entire seasons of great shows like Mad Men or Breaking Bad fairly quickly and without commercial interruption. There are still many shows I've never seen, but I can still see them whenever I want. And I don't even need to plunk down $50 to buy them, because I can rent them.

I still buy comics every so often, but only in trade paperback format as a collection of a series. I haven't gotten back into the serial comics I used to follow because I can't keep up anymore; just no time. I know Marvel has a digital subscription that seems pretty reasonable, but I have enough reading material that I don't get to.

I probably consume more media now than I ever used to thanks to the Internet, but now it's podcasts and blogs in addition to music, TV, books and movies. I'm not really a completist anymore because once you grow up, it becomes much harder (for me, anyway) to obsess to such a degree. Now it's about getting to what I can when I can. And I'm okay with that.