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Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Why I Don't Bother With Comics

I like comics, I just can't get into the whole comic culture. Crazy apocalyptic miniseries, crossover issues, complete universe reboots... all at $2.99 a pop. I'm just not interested in all that Marvel and DC stuff, man. Now, I like a good Vertigo title here and there, odd twists on the superhero genre from a strange British magician, the classics of course, and I'm always up for a real superhero. Superman, X-Men, Spidey and the rest of the Hollywood fodder I don't get all that excited about. Now Batman, that's a solid character that hasn't been screwed up yet - oh wait, never mind.

Yep, the bastards killed off Batman. Maybe. No one saw a body, so you know what that means. Writer Grant Morrison says it's a fate worse than death anyway. Eh, sorry. This is the comic version of a Sarah Palin card and I'll not be paying attention to it. I did however recently dig up this thing:

I was pleasantly surprised to find this in a box of comics when I cleaned out my car recently. There was a great used bookstore called Rowans in Marietta, but they closed up shop earlier this year. I got a box of comics for a nickel apiece at their going out of business sale and this was one of them. It's an origin story about how this big, burly, nature loving spy discovers an evil corporate plot to take over Canada and make the hockey-loving citizens slaves to their greedy plans. And he fights back by... putting on a spandex costume and protesting. Oh, and the hero's son is apparently deaf. And the hero is also a ninja. With a homeless ninja sidekick. And his brother is one of the evil dudes trying to ruin Canada. It's a very strange comic.

But anyway, what the hell does this have to do with baseball cards??? Well, nothing, actually. This comic is the avatar of one of your fellow bloggers though, Captain Canuck of Waxaholic! And since he's really bummed about the Javier Vazquez trade and the fact that the entire government of Canada has gone all Higglety-Pigglety (although he's way more depressed by the trade then with the government collapse), I thought this might cheer him up.

Cheer up Brian! Put on your costume, get your bullhorn and go yell at Frank Wren not to do anything stupid at the winter meetings!

4 comments:

William Noetling said...

Actually they're going to be $3.99 a pop fairly soon. The monthly "comic book" is going the way of the dodo - the TOP selling comic book every month sells only about 100,000 copies, which is down BIG-TIME from the 90's when a couple of issues sold in the 10s of millions (though that is also down BIG time from the Golden Age of comics during the 30's and 40's when some comics REGULARLY sold in the millions.)

The popularity of Manga and trade-paperbacks where you get a huge chunk of story in a nice book for less than the price of those same issues is causing the decay and downfall of the monthly periodical we now call "comics".

Pirate scanned comics are also having a detrimental effect on sales, even though the big comics companies have no other online alternative that is viable. There have been a FEW DVD sets of comics released, and Marvel has a starter program which lets you legally download comics for a fee, but their archives are woefully small and new comics are posted RARELY. Whereas you can bit-torrent the latest comics the day after they hit newsstands (and sometimes the day they hit newsstands).

As a LONG-time reader and collector (I read my comics FIRST before I put them away in their shiney plastic bags), my own comic buying has decreased to the point where I buy one or two comics a MONTH, and only certain titles that I actually want to keep. If I don't want to keep it, I don't buy it, I download it. Because after 6,000+ comics, I no longer have any room. I can't possibly find room for another long-box holding 300 or so comics, but I can download 300 or so comics and throw them on a CD or DVD and read them any time I want.


Also I might add that your philosophy on comics seems a bit short-sighted. You seem to think that there's only super-hero comics out there, and that's really not the case. Sure comics are DOMINATED by the super-heroics of the DC and Marvel universe, but there are so many other genres of comics being produced, horror, sci-fi, slice-of-life, mystery, autobiographical and so on. Comics aren't just about Super-Heroes. In fact, some of the great comics (Maus, Sandman) aren't about Super-Heroes at all.

dayf said...

Someone didn't click on my links :)

TPBs are pretty much the only thing I get nowadays and I don't really have all that much time to read them. I couldn't pass up a short box or really awful comics for 6 bucks though.

Captain Canuck said...

thanks man... I needed a cheer up like that...

and that line is one of my favourite movie lines from one of my favourite movies...
okay, maybe not my favourite movie, but a classic nonetheless...

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