If you want to keep your comic a course in miracles collection in tiptop shape, comic book supplies will become part of your collecting life. As soon as a magazine is printed there are natural environmental forces going to work to try and destroy the ink and the paper. You have put in a lot of time, effort and enjoyment in acquiring all your comics. You don’t want them to turn back to the dust and elements from which they came do you?
Elements such as humidity, temperature, pollutants, human skin oils and even the
chemicals of the printed materials themselves, will start to deteriorate and discolor your
comic books from day one. Tools that have been developed over the years to help us
combat these natural forces are de-acidification paper, polymer type storage bags, stiff
backing material, storage boxes and desiccants (dehumidification materials). Not only
will these comic book supplies protect your comics for your own enjoyment, they will
add to reinforce the future value of each comic book.
Most all of these supplies can typically be located down at your local comic book shop.
But as I have discovered lately, there can be a world of difference in preservation abilities
depending on what materials are used in the manufacture of comic book supplies. Quite
typically what you may find downtown will be of sufficient protective quality to protect
your comics for quite a while. Although, polybags, to put your comics into, are quite
common and fairly cheap, Mylar bags are definitely the way to go. They will protect for
100 years (that may be a little overboard) as opposed to 2 or 3 years for poly.
There has been a lot of elaborate science, particularly chemistry, which has gone into
preservation material manufacturing the last several years. Micro Chamber material has
been developed that will increase preservation from de-acidification and environmental
breakdown for a vastly superior time period as opposed to typical materials available
today. Beware though, comic book supplies manufactured with this new material can
quite costly. But if you have some serious collector’s items, which you feel are
worth a significant amount of cash, isn’t the investment worth it? It is also no secret that
CGC uses these materials in every comic book they grade.
