I thought following Marie Kondo would be liberating. I didn’t expect it to become a new battleground in my marriage

Corey Mintz is the author of How to Host a Dinner Party and host of the Taste Buds podcast.

Every superhero has an origin story, and so does every comic-book collection. Mine grew out of a conversation at recess one May afternoon in 1984, when my friend Anooj asked what I was getting for my ninth birthday, which I would celebrate later that week. Every Saturday, I watched the cartoon Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, waiting for a repeat of my favourite episode, featuring a team of heroes called the X-Men. Anooj informed me that there was a comic that was just about the X-Men and that they also starred in another comic called Secret Wars, which featured the most brilliant idea a nine-year-old could imagine: A magical being makes every superhero fight every villain for no particular reason.

I was hooked.

From that point on, I went to the comic-book store every week, my collection growing inside a drawer in the bedroom I shared with…