"I am annoyed. Many of the items in Pile 'A' do not belong there but instead belong in places 'B,' 'C,' 'D,' and so on.

"So I start to move things about. Items from Pile 'A' which belong in Place 'B' are taken to Place 'B' where I discover Pile 'B' which contains items which have strayed from other places."

Those are the captions from two panels from Brian Bolland's "Moving Things About" full-page essay, which ends, "Our time on this planet is but brief, hardly more than a blip. For me, much of that time is spent … moving things about."

So on this Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, I was Moving Things About in the upstairs "study," so-called out of deference to what it used to be. I was actually not looking for anything. It was, rather, an attempt to clear a spot in which I could dump stuff.

But what should I find, sitting under a box top containing a miscellany of tiny junk, but a small stack of papers and three photo albums. The papers included my parents' mimeographed publication  The Cricket #1 ("a periodical of culture and reefinement") complete with epigraph "You plays cricket, drinks tea, an' lifs the pinky when you holds the cup ..." [by Walt Kelly] dated June 1949, when I was 6. Within that issue was an essay by Mom that began:

BEST SELLERS

So many friends have asked me in grim or pathetic tones, "Do you approve of comic books?" that I feel I must make some public statement which I can hand out to such gals and run for cover while they are reading it. The question, of course, makes about as much sense as "Do you approve of books?" but it is hard to say this without being thought impertinent or irrelevant by the questioners.

Later in the issue is an essay on "Periodical Browsing" that includes the conclusion:

The largest number of periodicals in our household seems, in spite of culture and reefinement, to be made up of comic books. Most of our collection are really intended to be comic -- that is, funny. Most of them are published by the Dell Publishing Company and portray the doings of urban children (Little Lulu, Henry) or urban animal child-substitutes (Walter Lantz, Merrie Melodies, Walt Disney, Tom and Jerry, etc.). The cream of the crop were, in the recent past, Our Gang, Raggedy Ann, and Fairy Tale Parade (still Dell) with the excellent drawing, interesting stories and amusing dialogue of Walt Kelly, Dan Noonan, and Morris Gollub; but these three gentlemen seem to be deserting the comic book business and two of the publications are no longer in existence. The least painful comics still on the market other than the ones I have just mentioned seem to be the Disney ones. I should recommend a recent special, still on the stands in Canton[, New York] -- "Donald Duck in the Treasure of the Andes" [the now-classic Dell Four Color #223 "Lost in the Andes" by Carl Barks, anonymous at the time] -- as the best of the recent dime publications for the four-to-eight year old. We do seem to have accumulated a number of Superboy, Wonder Woman, and Bat Man [sic] opera, but these do not hold the attention of our six-year-old for more than five or six readings. Even Raggedy Ann can beat that.

In the midst of conjecture about early fanzines with comics references, I offer the fact that there were amateur magazines in the 1940s that provided adult critiques of comics in addition to the SF fanzines that focused on such material as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Those fanzines were not the match flame that ignited the field of comics collecting that continues today, but they were certainly published.

For quite some time now, I have pretty much compulsively wandered through the DVD section of stores that have one -- even when my mission to the store might be to, say, buy gloves or storage bins.

Yesterday, in the course of a trip to the recordable DVD shelf of Best Buy to buy a bunch of 8x DVD+R discs (because my aging RCA DRC8040 DVD recorder won't recognize blank discs of 16x or above, so, when I can no longer find 8x discs, its use as a recorder will be gone) ... Oh, let's start a new sentence. On the course of a Best Buy trip, I stumbled over the second season of The Greatest American Hero, labeled at $32.99, for $14.99. I hadn't even known it was available, much less available for $15.

Then, in the midst of walking through Target, I found the fifth season of Smallville (list at about $60, ordinary Target price something like $24) for $19.99.

And at the moment, I'm in the midst of the Heroes DVDs, having just finished the sixth episode. And that's not to mention the Collector's Edition of Serenity, the culmination of one of my favorite TV series that has no true connection with comics. I could spend the entire Labor Day Weekend without cleaning my house.

But I won't. I won't.