A Change in the Natural Order

Comic long boxes. The bane of any longtime comic collector. A necessary evil that all of us have had to put up with since man first wanted to put his comics in order. I'm sure that a lot like me, many of you have at least a dozen long comic boxes sitting in your basement, spare bedroom, or maybe even in your mom's basement. They're big, white, hard to handle, obnoxious beasts. If you don't have a table that you can lay them all out on like some stores do, chances are they're stacked in the corner, probably three to four high. What say you're an X-Men fan. Now several times a month you have to dig out that bottom box and file your new comics, right? Right. What a pain in the ass. But up until now, you haven't really had a choice.

Enter Drawer Boxes. To be honest, it's such a great idea that I'm surprised that it took someone this long to come up with it. Simply put, they're cardboard filing boxes. The comic drawer, which is about 3-4 inches shorter then a standard long box, slides into a reinforced, double layered cardboard box. The double layers of cardboard enhance the strength of the box, enabling it to handle up to 44 lbs per square inch. This means you can stack them about six boxes high and still be able to pull the drawer no problem. In a strength test done by another store, they had one of their employees stand on two the boxes. First he put both feet in the middle of box. The box did bend and was pretty badly beaten, but not broken, and was still considered usable. Next he stood with his feet on the outside, distributing his weight across the entire surface as it's supposed to be. Didn't even wobble. And this was an empty box, full boxes tend add more strength from what was said there. FYI, the employee weighed in at about 260 lbs,

But when you come down to it, what's the advantage of these over regular long boxes? Accessibility. I know many people who haven't even seen some of their books in at least 5 years just because it's too much of hassle to dig them out. With Drawer Boxes you'll have easy access to your entire library of comics without having to be able to bench press a Buick. The other big advantage? Floor space - since you can stack them six high when fully loaded, you're dropping the amount of floor space they take up to as little as 15% of the original amount. Oh yeah, and you can get them at Star Clipper - I oughta mention that.

Dan