Youseph Tanha

I got a great e-mail from Hamp Freeman this last weekend who read my post on IKEA photo frames hack for comic books and decided to drive 3 hours to his nearest IKEA to pickup a set of these photo frames for his own comic book collection. He was kind enough to share with me some great photos of his comic now proudly displayed on his walls. Check out his e-mail to me below.

I’m from Raleigh, North Carolina, where I went to NC State to get a Master’s of Industrial Design. Comics were a minor interest as a kid, but came out even more when I went to the College of Design. I found it really interesting to see how they have affected entertainment and popular media through their design over the years, especially within the past few years. Recently, I fell into some rare comic books (my girlfriend’s father gave me a few of his old comic books when he found out how interested I was in them, and they happen to be some of the earliest issues of The Amazing Spider-Man) and this got me very excited to not only collect these amazing covers, but find a way to show them off. I never wanted to be “that comic book guy” who hides his collection in boxes to keep them safe. I was proud to own these books, and wanted to share their history with those that came by.

I scoured the internet one day, looking up “how to frame comic book covers” and like you, found that most of the products out there are pretty expensive, something a recent college graduate couldn’t afford, especially not in the mass quantity I wanted. I finally came about your blog post (drawn in by the mention of IKEA) and became really excited about the idea of a D.I.Y. IKEA solution that was affordable. I had to drive to Charlotte, NC to get them, but it has made all the difference in the world. I bought 16 while there, and plan on getting another batch soon.

Your solution is incredibly effective. Not only for its affordability, but also because the IKEA frames allow me to quickly change out the covers to show off different collections in the same area. I have a few different sets of collections going right now and I plan on switching out different collections to keep my room’s art always changing. Right now I have three collections going at once. The first are classic issues of my favorite Marvel characters, chosen by their cover designs. The second are homage covers to Spider-Man #1. I really find the concept of “paying tribute” to past covers by recreating the design with updated characters to be very interesting and visually stunning (something that can’t quite be completely understood until you see them all up together). My final set of collections are the “Marvel Zombies Homage Covers paired with their originals”. Basically their is a comic book artist, Arthur Suydam, who created amazingly painted covers for a yearly series “Marvel Zombies” where he took classic covers recreated them to have zombies in them. You can see the Spider-Man#1 zombie counter part in the previously mentioned picture, but also the 2nd picture shows the classic “Spider-Man Wedding” matched its zombie counter part. Suydam’s covers are really interesting and you can find a list of the covers at his wikipedia page.

So that pretty much sums up the whole process. I apologize for getting a bit long winded, but finding your solution really rebooted my interest in comics, and I’ve been incredibly excited to show off everything.

I think it is so great when people like Hamp share stores like this with me. I hope this becomes a thing on the Internet where more and more people take pictures and share their comic book photo frames with me. Feel free to contact me if you have done a project like this. I would like to hear about it.