Comic Books

I haven't blogged about comic books here yet, so here we go.

I first bought a comic book (Thor #191) in the Miami International airport on my way to or from the Canal Zone. I liked it! I was ten or so, but Marvel comics at the time were sophisticated. Stan Lee, at the very end of his writing of Thor, was actually writing decent blank verse for Thor's pseudo-Shakespearian language. My ten year-old vocabulary was pretty large, but I'd say comics expanded it substantially.

Over the next, uh, many years, I kept buying comics. I missed that infamous moment in my teens when young buyers get interested in girls or cars or whatever. Well, I got interested in girls, to be sure, but my girlfriends were fellow nerds, for the most part, so it didn't hurt my social standing to collect comics. I have a pretty substantial collection, as one can imagine. There was a point in the mid-90s when I probably had purchased literally every monthly issue of Avengers and Fantastic Four for twenty years, to say nothing of back issues (they were affordable once) going back to about 1965, all my limited pocketbook would bear. Obviously, I was always something of a Marvel-head; DC was kids stuff when I started, although I liked the Legion of Super-Heroes title a little (and later a lot more) and I liked the old DC golden age heroes of the Justice Society of America. In the 80s, I followed my favorite writer, Roy Thomas, over to DC as they became more accessible and interesting for the older reader.

I was always more of a reader than a collector - I'm happy to have nice trade paperbacks collecting old stuff I enjoyed back in the day, and will probably gradually unload the original comic books as I accumulate more stuff that will sit neatly on a shelf where it is easier to get at.

But I'm in something of a downward spiral in current comic book purchases, probably for the first time in a very long time. My love affair with sequential graphic storytelling has been remarkably consistent over the years as I also toyed with or plunged into many other hobbies. But now doubt creeps in.

Here is a link to the DC solicitations for April; here is Marvel.

For the first time in a very long time, as I looked down this list, only one title interested me at DC, Justice Society of America. Two others, Secret Six and Fables, I will likely buy in collected format in due course. DC has gradually pushed me away for the past couple of years. After a wonderful weekly title, 52, the succeeding weeklies, Countdown and Trinity, have been awful (or in the case of Trinity, perhaps just not to my taste). Continuity and consistency at DC have gone up in flames - I can't tell what they think they're doing or where they're going anymore. Ok if the stories are also entertaining, but mostly they're not. All-Star Superman, a 12 issue monthly that actually came out about quarterly, was exquisite, but there hasn't been much else to brag about at DC. They keep rebooting an old favorite, Legion of Super-Heroes, but they keep cancelling the new versions. I'm getting tired of that - in April, they're not published in any version. They are presently in the process of making the most awful flub of their big cross-over event, Final Crisis. I can't even tell what the story is about, and I don't think they know either. It actually borders on incoherence. (Same writer, Grant Morrison, as All-Star Superman, by the way. Not the same result.)

Marvel fares a little better in this month's solicitations. Despite my distaste for their hot writer, Brian Bendis, and my irritation with their big recent cross-overs, Civil War and Secret Invasion, they are actually publishing some issues I'm interested in reading that month. Captain America continues to be solidly entertaining; I'll give Mighty Avengers a try (Dan Slott, a favorite, is writing it), and I'm looking forward to Agents of Atlas. But I'm not happy with Bendis' continued muddling of Dr. Strange, an old favorite who hasn't had an ongoing in over a decade. Bendis doesn't get the character - he can't even be bothered to do the speech patterns or powers in any recognizable or even consistent way. And yet he seems to like using the character. Collecting every appearance of Dr. Strange is my one "collector" thing as opposed to "reader", so I'm in the position of needing to buy these awful things and not reading them - this isn't "my" Dr. Strange.

(An aside - my preference for less popular titles and characters is infamous. Proprietors of comic stores have been known to laugh and tell me that I won't like something, it's selling like hotcakes. Obviously, not strictly true or I wouldn't like superhero comics at all, but a good rule for the average day. Bendis' great popularity and ability to sell comics cuts no ice with me.)

So, what, am I growing up? Well, not likely. But I am thinking about getting an awful lot more selective about comics. I'm tired of lugging around the sheer bulk of my collection. It's a storage problem of expensive and annoying proportions; it's a record-keeping nightmare; re-reading old issues is tiresome from a logistical perspective, which is why trades of the better stuff are so appealing.

And I'm beginning to wonder if I should just stop buying the monthlies altogether. Why not? I want them in trades - why buy them twice? I haven't been to a comics store this year - certainly the longest gap in visits in my entire collecting experience. They aren't publishing much that I want; Amazon can supply trade paperback or other collections much cheaper; accumulating more back issues just adds to my storage and record-keeping dilemmas. And if Marvel keeps letting Brian Bendis write Dr. Strange, I think I'm going to have to make a Bendis rule for my Dr. Strange collection - his appearances don't count.