Rebuilding my pull list.

Recently, I listened to an episode of the podcast Longbox Review entitled The Gutters: The culling, in which the host, Eric, went through his pull list and cut it down from seventy five to ten.

It got me thinking about my own pull list, which I've spent the better part of 2015 whittling down to a bare minimum in order to make up for the fact that I'm not as rich as I used to be.

Well, finally, after almost ten months of planning, calculating and cutting I think I've reached that point. I think I've finally gotten my pull list down to the bare minimum I desired.

Now I can rebuild it, after all I have the technology!!! (Six Million Dollar Man. Get it? Because I'm rebuilding ..... Ok, I'll move on).

So, going forward my pull list will consist of several rules in order to keep it at its best:

1. My Monthly budget will be a fixed figure and any monies not spent on comics during that month will roll over to the next month. This will allow me to the odd extra comic here and there but, regardless, there will be no exceeding that combined total. In the event of that there are too many comics on a pull list then cuts will be enforced (For which see rule 2).
2. Division of comics between digital and print will consist of the simple plan that all limited/mini-series are bought digitally while all ongoing series will be bought in print (with the exception of Black Science and Copperhead, which were already being picked up digitally). There are logistical reasons for this, such as I'm wanting to save space while I'm not ready to go fully digital yet. But also, digital mini-series mean that I can cut them short to pick back up later in the event of over spending in a particular month, without getting too far behind in a story.
3. Decisions over whether to drop a series will occur after one poor issue (in my opinion). This is mostly to weed out the stronger new books from the substandard ones (again, all based on my opinion). Also, because I have to order print comics at my LCS two months in advance, I can't give a book more time to impress me as it means ordering further along. Effectively, a comic will last for three issues at minimum. However, titles I have long runs on will get an additional issue to regain itself as I'm pretty much invested by then anyway.

And so, there are the criterion for my pull list (Hey, if Asimov can have three laws of robotics, I can have three for my comics). Of course, I strongly suspect I'll have broken these before I'm halfway through 2016 but at least I can try and control my collecting and stop myself from boing bankrupt or, even worse, being forced to give up comics just as they are getting good.

Now, this is probably not that interesting to anyone else as it's a lot of gobbledygook (even I started getting lost), but I figured if I wrote it all down it would make not sticking to the plan a whole lot harder.

But this is theory, now I've got to put it into practice.