... and that means it's time to start looking toward the end of the year, winter, and more. I'm looking at my list of "things to do before the end of 2007" and figuring what remains. There's sealing the driveway, for example, and having my vision checked for 2007. In previous months, there have been an assortment of annual exams -- for me, my car, and my furnace, for example -- already taken care of. New hot water tank. And so on.

And figuring the end of the year isn't that far off, I'm starting to put together that list of people for whom I try to pick up some sort of gift. One down (as I posted at CBGXtra, itself), but a lot to go. A Heritage lot of treats I bought for myself just came in -- and I've finally grabbed the chance to open them. It's delicious, almost 100% Walt Kelly comics at about $25 each in nice shape. Hilarity abounds.

So what do you hope for at year's end? And have you done all the "things to do" on your list?

Don't forget it tonight, folks! I can hardly wait. (And did you see Hiro on the cover of Entertainment Weekly? Marvelous!)

9-10 p.m. Eastern Time.

As I look at the evolution of comic-book collecting, it suddenly occurs to me that another invention besides the plastic bag has had an influence on long-term comic-book preservation.

Collectors looking to make the fragile paper last longer were encouraged in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to use a tool first distributed in 1930. How lucky we were that we had Scotch Cellophane Tape to reinforce covers and centerfolds, not to mention the mending of those small tears that so often plagued comic-book readers!

Not satisfied to rest on its laurels, the 3M company introduced in 1961 its Scotch Magic Transparent Tape. Great! It's a tape that About.com describes as, "an almost invisible tape that never discolored and could be written on." Guess no one on that website ever compared new Scotch Magic mending to Scotch Magic mending that's a few years old. Oh, and the bonus? It's almost impossible to remove, as opposed to the plain Scotch Cellophane Tape.

The more I realize that I've forgotten important aspects of the comic-book field, whether it's as regards its distribution, the public perspective on that field, or the problems of collecting itself.

There just weren't plastic bags -- whether for food or comics -- in the 1940s, for example. (I can recall my mother making Christmas presents in, um, maybe 1950: She'd buy sheets of cellophane and then carefully cut to the desired size and iron the edges so as to make storage bags for family and friends.)

Of course, if I were to go into that sort of detail, I'd never be able to cram this "analysis" into four print pages. But that's the point, in a way. It's fascinating to realize in just how many ways technology and world events have shaped our field into what it is today.

Earlier in this blog, I posted an essay on Comics Yesterday vs. Comics Today. For the print column, I'm going to try some sort of timeline of the changes in the field, making sweeping statements and drawing what I hope will be some relatively valid conclusions.

Which all and sundry will then be free to pick away at.

I have a deep suspicion that many of today's readers and collectors are so used to the way comics are bought and sold today that they don't realize quite how different things used to be. Heck, even in my case, I hadn't done more than generalize about the way comics prices have changed for the "average buyer" -- or who, in fact, that "average buyer" could be said to be.

If you have deep insights on such matters, I'd be pleased to see what they are. But I think there are those, for example, who may think a specific title wasn't "popular," when what it was was "unseen." In the 1950s, for example, if the distributor to your grocery store didn't bother to put Magazine Enterprise's comics on that store's comics rack, you might not have known there was such a publisher -- and you might never have seen Frank Frazetta's work on Ghost Rider.

There have been more changes in this business, folks, than many people know. And I'll share my perspectives in hopes that others with more information will share theirs.

So I've just discovered that, in order to get a fireplace that works, I'm going to have to Move Lots of Things from one spot in my house to another.

Surely, there's an easy way to do that? No? Moaannnn.