And I thought I devoured comics as a kid

It feels like I'm saying that the dog ate my homework, but termites ate my comic books.

One of the projects I have been meaning to tackle each trip home is checking and re-cataloging all my comic books. I have about 15-20 long boxes in the basement, but the dehumidifier down there hasn't been working right for years and the May Day floods really upped the moisture level down there. I thought the basement was a much better environment that the scalding attic but I may have made a mistake there.

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As I started to go through the boxes, I was aghast to discover that termites ate through four boxes of carefully cataloged comic. Probably 95% of my collection was bagged (and mostly boarded), but the termites or whatever managed to turn a box of graphic novels into one giant ant farm, with tunnels and turns throughout the cube. At first I thought it was bookworms or the like, until I found there they were able to bite and pincer their way through the bags in some cases devouring entire issues inside their bags.

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My collection is extensive and thoughtful enough that I was hoping to use it to fund a down payment on a house. Now I'm not so sure. I salvaged a lot from the eaten boxes and will have to re-bag all of those, and document the new gaps in the collection. Luckily many of the other boxes were spared. I didn't get to the back seven boxes and will have to do some assessment on the next trip. But damn I could not believe how boxes of carefully collected comics could be so easily transformed into an ant/termite colony.