Sick of seeing boxes of comics tucked away in corners and too damn stingy to send them off to a proper bindery, I set out determined to make myself some fine shelf porn. This is my journey.

The two books I was working here were a (nearly; there was some kind of Motorola special issue I refuse to pay ~$100 for) complete collection of Spyboy, about 27 issues, and the first 18 issues or so of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man. First was prepping the books, which was easy for Spidey as it was all reprinted floppies; all I had to do was remove the staples. Spyboy, however,  I was working from TPB’s for 13 issues. So I had to take them apart.  There may or may not have been a river of tears.

We thank you, brave soldier, for your sacrifice.

In order to best further the mauling of my books, I decided it would be best to poke a bunch of holes in the spine and sew them through the fold. Never mind that it’s probably the best method for binding a book and one of the very few options available to me without tons of expensive machinery. So yeah, we’ll go with that.

Let the hole poking begin!

Hole poking complete

Might be a little hard to see, but there's thread in there, I swear!

Halfway there! Had to sew around the tapes, as they add some stability.

One down!

And Spyboy makes two!

Spyboy, again, proved to be more troublesome than the fairly straightforward Spidey book. The trades I used, conveniently and oh so mercifully, were actually folded and sewn with the cover glued on, which was excellent. The glue they used making the paper more brittle, not so much. So I had to use some acid-free document repair tape, make sure they wouldn’t fall apart one me before I stabbed and bound ‘em.

And that’s it for this time around. Come back next time (next week, maybe?) where I throw paste around like a two year old!