"Childhood Sale," a video about letting go of your comics collection

[Video Link] Filmmaker Casimir Nozkowski, whose work we regularly feature on the Boing Boing in-flight TV channel on Virgin America, tells Boing Boing:

I just made a new short movie about me trying to sell ALL of my childhood comics... IN AN EPIC STOOP SALE.

Here are some of the emotional states I went thru while making this movie: nostalgia, liberation, catharsis, melancholy, confusion, elation, regret, enthusiasm, depression, somewhat dazed...

And finally confirmation that at 35 it's good to get rid of childhood things and not bad to feel a little sad doing it.

• [metacyclotron]

  I have original issues of the Dark Knight series AND X-Men circa ’87. Still not sure when to let them go and how.

• [nowimnothing]

  Here is an observation as I wait for the video to load:  Sell the collectibles (at least the ones you are not interested in) but keep the cheap ones for your kids. I cleaned out an old box a few years ago and sold a few hundred poor shape/non-noteworthy comics on ebay. I think my total take was less than $30. Now that my daughter is getting older I kind of wish I had held on to them.  She likes to flip through the few I have left and I would not have to worry about her tearing them up or even cutting out pictures for a project.

• [Sterling Anderson]

  I really like his observations on current prices. I was in to comics in the early 80′s and for years I remember my mom telling me to not get rid of them because they would pay for my college. When I realized that was not going to happen I held on to them for my kids’ college funds. Now… I let my kids read them and use them for collage material all they want.

• [OtherMichael]

  Well, yeah, sell off “Power Pack.”

  He seemed pretty happy at the end. And the little girl who found the robot inside of a comic? That alone might have made it worthwhile.

  • [noah django]

     that girl was the best!

• [Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston]

  Here are some of the emotional states I went thru while making this movie: nostalgia, liberation, catharsis, melancholy, confusion, elation, regret, enthusiasm, depression, somewhat dazed…

  Here are some of the emotional states I went thru while reading this:
  Happiness, sadness, vomitousness, smelly, jumping, fleas, a little sweaty, pins and needles, jealousy, rabies, scabies, bumblebees, Little Shop of Horrors, cancerous, nauseated, celery, autistic, sleepy, a little more vomitous, then happy again, chained, oppressed, racist, and finally: Zordon.

• [Gspeex J]

  I’m trying really hard to hang on to some comics for my kids to look at, but have been cutting them up to decoupage furniture. So far, I’m only using the DC comics that I don’t care about (All-Star Squadran, Batman & the Outsiders, Superman) and have duplicate copies of. I think I should at least hang on to some Marvel Tales, just for the stories.
   I lost a bunch somewhere, but I figure it’s karma- I stole many of them when I was a kid…

• [Mister44]

  I am in a similar boat. There are several series I’d like to maybe collect again someday. But I have a lot of crap that I got suckered into during the ‘glut’. Right now I’ve been giving my nephews books for their birthday etc.

• [dmc10]

  Screw that… I’ll sell my comics, my LEGO, my D&D books and my train sets… NEVER.  If my wife can have a huge closet for her shoes, I can have one for all my nerdy goodness !!!

• [dmc10]

  … oh yeah, and my Magic: The Gathering, and hockey cards, I’m keeping those too :)

• [rtresco]

  My mom sent me all my comics earlier this year (circa 85-90) and out of curiosity I plugged them into a website that will tell you what they’re worth, based on condition:
  http://www.mycomicshop.com/webuycomics

  She only sent about half of what I had and it tallied around $1,500, so I’d say sell ‘em to a proper outlet, not on the street for a buck. Granted the site I mentioned will buy them from you at a fraction of what they say they’re worth, but it gives you an idea of what you can get if you have the time and energy to sell them individually yourself at their full price on ebay or wherever. If you’re looking to unload, the site also says they’ll buy full collections – give them a run down on what you have and I think they’ll make an offer.

• [MrScience]

  Woah! Sandman was the first comic that I actually tried to get each issue when it came out. Definitely different fare from the Archie and Scrooge and Tin Tin that I had been acquiring before. :)

• [simonbarsinister]

  My friends would wear gloves and put their comics into hermetically sealed bags, while I would read my comics in bed, upside down, in the bath, in a tree, rolled up in my back pocket, I’d wake up in the morning with comics under my drooling cheek.

  I think I got the better value.

• [SpaceOtter]

  Sold my collection in the mid-90′s for almost 5k to somebody opening a comic shop, and I’d return all the money plus interest to get my collection back. Oh how I miss those things.

  • [tyr]

     Download the comics and read them on your iPad. Who needs physical artefacts, we’re living in the future.

• [x jeremy jarratt]

  somebody hold me

• [Michael J. Epstein]

  My wife just made me watch this because I am in the same situation. She really wants me to get rid of a few thousand of them…it’s hard. It’s not even that I want them, but I really want someone who cares about them to have them.

• [Theranthrope]

  This is a Puritan ethic:
  “When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” (…and yet, still understood as a child. Just a bigger, hairier, child; I may add.) .

  Puritans spent nearly every waking moment in absolute sheer terror that someone… somewhere… ANYWHERE… might be having fun. That terror was so strong, that they had to make the long and dangerous trip to a whole different continent so they can be free to enforce their particular brand of iron-fisted fundamentalist dogma without interference (the lot of good it did them in the long-run, though. As they abstinenced themselves into “extinction”). 

  Living by Puritan ethics is probably NOT for the best, as they live as the OPPOSITE of a happy mutant.