Buried Treasure

Inspired by DC's rash of universe-shattering events, with Infinite Crisis, 52 and now Countdown, I felt the urge to dig up the company's Zero Hour crossover and re-read.

The only problem is, my collection is not as organized as you might think... everything is pretty much in order, bagged and boarded, for the most part... the problem is, there is a definite divide in where they are. The newer stuff -- say, the past 3 years or so since College -- is on top of everything basically just in piles.

The older stuff -- everything before College -- is underneath everything. And what is everything you ask? Well, there is a box full of random crap, a box full of action figures (I think that specific box is from my DragonBall Z toy phase), a box of video tapes, some books, my old CD drive from a really old Gateway computer, some more books, a Ninja Turtle Techodrome Module toy and a stack of Newspapers with stories I've written in them.

Still, I needed to read Zero Hour. So I carefully removed each and every piece of crap guarding entrance to my two giant boxes of old comics -- making very sure to remember the order which I moved them so that they would all fit back together later. I searched through the first box of comics, finding my old issues of Louise Simonson's X-Factor (my personal favorite series ever), mid 1980's to early 90's X-Men, and a bunch of old Ninja Turtles and Thundercats issues. NO DC.

I pushed a giant heavy white box over so I could look through the second box of comics. I found all of my Supermans -- the Death of, the Funeral of, the Reign of, the return of -- as well as my Batmans, Flashes, Blue Beetles, Booster Golds, Justice Leagues, Legends crossover -- I took that out to save for later reading -- I even found some issues of Captain Adam. But NO ZERO HOUR.

Sweating and exhausted, I could not figure out where Zero Hour went... and then I realized I also had no clue of where my post mid-1980's Justice Leagues went... they all had to be somewhere, right?

After putting everything carefully back into place, I realized, I had no idea of what was in the really really really heavy White Box I was only pushing around... I opened up the box and found All my Justice Leagues, complete with the crossovers like Millennium, Invasion and, yes, Zero Hour, all put in order.

I then remembered -- not too long ago I had a similar urge to re-read all my Justice Leagues, only after going through all the effort to find them, and organize them with the crossovers in order, I was too damn tired to start reading them, and forgot all about it.

The moral of this story? Poor organization will lead to manual labor instead of reading fun. Bet you thought there was gonna be a punchline there, huh? Well searching through so much crap for no good reason is no laughing matter!