Comic Revelations

It’s finally come to this. My celebrated weekly Comic Book day is no more. Sure, publishers are still cranking out comics, new books are still showing up in shops on Wednesdays, and I’ll probably still track new releases but, officially, there are no titles I regularly purchase. None. I never thought this day would come. But two things happened to facilitate the change.

First, the handful of titles I regularly picked up eventually dropped off my list. Some were miniseries books that ended as scheduled. Others were dropped because I decided I simply didn’t care about the stories. Either way, they went away.

Second, I grew tired. As much as I looked forward to comic book day, I grew weary of watching the distribution lists to see what was coming out each week. Likewise, I got tired of waiting, buying bits of story each month to see “how things turned out”. Even the best stories were rarely worth the wait. And, if the story turned out lame after waiting so long, I was infuriated. Most recently, I dropped a title because its content quite suddenly grew inappropriate. Not only do I not want to buy that book anymore…I really want to get the whole lot out of my house. That’s the problem, it’s impossible to tell how good something will be until it’s already been. And it doesn’t help that comic books have gotten more and more expensive while I’ve remained impossibly cheap. It’s one thing for me to see a comic book and think “I can spring 3 bucks to see if it’s any good.” It’s another thing to know that you’ve really got to spring $20+ over the next few months. Ouch. There are a lot of other things I can do with $20.

The solution? Well, I’m not sure. There’s a trend in comics to collect books in graphic novels. They’re not as collectible as individual books but I like that I can have the complete store right now. I especially enjoy that I can read reviews of the entire story before buying in (some I can even pick up at the library). I know it’s silly but I also kind of like the fact that I can put them on my bookshelf. If I have the individual books I keep them stashed away in boxes and I never look at them. The novel, though, I’ll shelve but actually pull out and thumb through periodically.

Anyway, I’m looking at selling off some of my collection. We'll see how that turns out.