Batman and other comic book websites offer a wider variety of materials and resources than the normal brick-and-mortar stores. This is because the websites have more space and less of a need for storage space that traditional comic book stores need. If you got to a website like batman, you might get interested in the hobby and become a comic book collector yourself.

Online comic book collecting allows the collector to search for items that they really want. For instance, if you had every story that the Joker was ever in except for one or two, you would go to a site like Batman and be pretty sure you could find it somewhere.

This allows collectors to craft their collections with a lot more finesse, and take a lot less time doing it. Imagine how hard it would be if you had to wait until conventions came around or network every chance you got, in the hope of meeting a collector who had what you needed, and then trying to talk him out of it at a reasonable price.

Of course, the existence of sites like Batman shouldn't mean that the collector gives up on books on collecting comics. There is a lot of good information still being made available in print media. You will probably even find some good print books about online comic book collecting.

With online comic book collecting comes on line information trading as well. The Internet has revolutionized the way collectors collect, and the way they meet, and the sheer numbers of other collectors with whom they can interact, and the comic books and books on collecting comics they can potentially buy. Batman, for instance, has message boards on its DC Direct page.

Message boards like the ones on Batman are probably the best ways to hook up with other collectors and get information. Unlike blogs, these boards allow you to throw out a question and potentially get several expert opinions on it, where if you ask a blogger, he may or may not have an answer, or he may have the wrong answer.

On message boards, there is instant feedback on any answer you get, so it is a quicker way of "cross-referencing" information. Online comic book collecting is a quicker way of getting what you want, whether that is actual merchandise or information about merchandise and collecting.

The serious comic book collector should use whatever resources are readily available, whether those are books on collecting comics, sites like Batman or bloggers.

He will find that on line comic book collecting, while it may not contain some of the same thrills as the old way, such as following up on hard leads and physically traveling around for every scrap of information, there is a lot more information, and therefore a lot more comic books, to be had by the average collector.

So in some ways, it may be more fun because there is more competition, and that makes it more challenging.