I don't have any formal comics-related collecting projects but I have sort of fallen into a loose pattern in an effort to give some structure for my cultural pursuits in general, reading, viewing, listening: the 1950s, the 1990s, and "new" (as in current or relatively recent).

Initially I did have a more specific plan: to read more or less in chronological order some of the famous and/or influential literary works I had missed up to then, e.g. William Blake's long epic poems, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, etc. I chose to start in the Elizabethan era, since there were several famous Shakespeare plays I had never read and carry on from there, thinking it would only take me a couple years or so to catch up to the present day since I was only going to hit a few highlights along the way. And at first I did make pretty steady progress. But soon I started to go down various rabbit holes, becoming interested in things I had never previously thought of reading, or in some cases, had never even heard of before. And by the time I got into the 19th century, I was not only exploring previously unread-by-me writers like Trollope, Balzac, or Zola but also re-reading old favourites like Dickens, Dostoyesky, Poe, and so on.

Realising that at this rate it was going to be some years before I got to Finnegans Wake, I decided to jump ahead and, once a month, read something from the 20th Century, starting with the famously difficult Joyce book and carrying on from there - this is the strand that has now reached the late 1950s. Somewhere along the way, I remembered that there were comics I wanted to read from the same time period, so I started to get into things like Eisner's Spirit and Caniff's Steve Canyon (I'm still annoyed with myself for not thinking of it earlier, or I would have read Terry and the Pirates before Canyon).

I'm a little more hazy on how I got onto my other reading path, which has now reached the early 1990s. I think I may have had a vague idea that, since my adult life started more or less in the early 1980s, I should start reading some of the things that came out around that time that I was interested in but had missed or skipped for one reason or another. In comics, that included things like the various 2000AD series and Chaykin's American Flagg.

So putting all that together, it does sound like a project of sorts, but its current form seems somewhat arbitrary, I suppose because it has arisen so haphazardly and taken a shape that my original simple plan did not envisage.