Comic dividers are an amazing tool at helping you keep a bit of sanity, but are not required. If your comic collection is well-enough organized and concise, you may desire to avoid these relatively-expensive (a pack of 25 runs about $15ish, so you’re looking at 60 cents per) pieces of plastic.

My own personal mindset is that only runs of ten issues or greater will get an individual comic divider. This knocks out mostly anything that wasn’t released as a mini-series. There might be easy ways to pair them with other titles that work for you. For example…

• Collect items under an event banner (such as Flashpoint, Before Watchmen, Secret Wars, or Secret Wars [see what I did there?]).
• Collect items under a company (DC, Marvel, Image, etc.)
• Collect items under a time frame (“2014 Miniseries”)
• Collect items under a franchise (Punisher miniseries can all be collected under one header)
• Collect items under a marketing concept (First Wave, The New 52, Avengers Now)
• Collect items by similar creative teams (“Adam Warren” could collect Dirty Pair, Empowered one-shots, and Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal)

My personal plan is a bit of a hybrid:

• Some items are easy to collect: “GREEN LANTERN: NEW GUARDIANS (2011)” is a series and annuals, about as “normal” as you can expect from a publisher nowadays.
• When you have an event, “CONVERGENCE (2015)” is a collection of nearly four-dozen two-parters and one nine-issue series.
• “DIRTY PAIR (1988)” collects everything that was an American production of the Lovely Angels; it goes over multiple publishers and formats, but everything that’s not a graphic novel falls under this category, with many of them being related by Adam Warren’s involvement.

I shy away from temporal or brand divisions, but that may work for you.

Without looking in each box (or on labels affixed, as we’ll talk about), though, how do you know which box to go to?

A properly maintained spreadsheet.