completist n.

For the Completist.

We’ve been thinking for quite a while that Something Ought to be Done about the deluge of comic books that is slowly but surely driving completists crazy.

Completist, a dope who tries to have a complete collection in some line. The line may be as broad as having all the prozines ever published, or as narrow as collecting all the Golden Atom tales or all official correspondence during ones incumbency in some office.

Robert Shafer’s The Conquered Place (Putnam’s, $3.50) is a long and pretentious ‘serious novel’ on the s.f. theme of the future occupation of the U.S. by an unnamed but obviously Russian military force, and I regret to say that it fails equally as fiction and as extrapolation; for completists only.

The imbalance in this ratio makes it hard for me to recommend this collection to anyone but Resnick completists, inveterate fans of ‘good-natured fluff’.

Have you already bought Whirlwind and Goblins? Are you the sort of completist who’d happily buy them again just because they’ve been repackaged as a single volume?

For bibliophiles, collectors and completists, it was all very easy. Gazette 1 (electronic edition) became Gazette I (paper edition).