The obsessive’s compulsion

Okay, I will admit that I have been keeping track of my comic books since I was a kid.  Initially,  I kept a log of the purchases in a loose-leaf binder-one page per title and I would note the issue number, month and year of publication (and, yes, I still have this notebook).  The initial idea behind this was to have a record of all comic purchases for insurance coverage (back in the day when there was an actual potential resale market for comic back issues – pre-1990s).  Despite the decline of that market, it still helps to have a record of a collection. Nowadays, however, I’ve upgraded to logging my comics in a database (which has quite a few more data fields than my old notebook).  There are databases on the market for book collecting, record collecting, and even game collecting, but oddly enough, the comic-specific database selection is slight.  I have found one that I particularly like and so I’m sharing it here.

The database is called, appropriately enough, Comic Collector.  The company behind it started in the late ’90s with a fun little database for CDs called “Keep It Compact” which I had used then to keep track of my then-growing CD collection.  I stayed with the company through various version upgrades and eventually they expanded their line.  I jumped at Comic Collector.  The one drawback of this software, for me, is that a Mac-compatible version has never been released (and there are no plans for a release).  It has been great for Windows users, though, and Collectorz is working on a browser-based, platform independent version.