Hellblazer - the missing trades

I've had the last couple of mornings free and should have done something useful like Christmas shopping or hoovering. Instead, I've mooched around in my pants reading comics and watching shite DVDs until it's been time to go to work. Truly I feel shamed by my indolence. 

At least some of the comics I've wasted my time on have been good. Finished the fourth Hellblazer trade Family Man and started on the next, Rare Cuts. Sadly, this is where my mission to read Hellblazer in order goes tits up. For some reason whole wadges of the run are uncollected and I've now hit a point where, if I want to continue reading the series as it was meant to be read, I have to wade into the world of back issues. I've no problem with that per se, but the OCD side of my brain wants to line the entire run up on my bookshelf in order.

I could go down the route of buying the back issues and having them bound, but that would surely be too sad even for me. Binding has become quite the thing to do among certain sections of the comic collecting community though. Over at Comic Geek Speak there's even a forum devoted to it. I can see the attraction, but to be honest a lot of the books pictured on that forum look like textbooks from a university library to me. 

Even if I did find the binding attractive, I'm still crazed enough to listen to that whining little voice in the back of my head that tells me that binding my comics will render them worthless. Given that the majority of them are worthless anyway, this is of course a ridiculous argument. But, that voice is a persuasive little fucker and might get unbearably loud were I actually to go ahead and start binding floppies.

So yeah, not sure what the solution is here. I might write to DC/Vertigo and find out if they intend to collect the missing issues at any point. If they do, then I'm prepared to wait. You'd think it would be worth their while, I mean surely they can shift a bunch of new Hellblazer trades. They'll probably go ahead and collect it all in omnibus format at some point anyway, but now I'm started down the road of paperbacks, I want to get to the end. 

Who said comic collecting was easy eh?

For anyone still awake and interested in the collected Hellblazer, there's a full list of what IS reprinted in this excellent Wikipedia link