I struggled for a while to think of a topic for my first official post following my big introduction, and I eventually figured it’d be most fitting to continue on the topic of what I’ve been up to this past year, specifically how it relates to my reading habits:
2011 was a tumultuous year for me on many levels, one filled with more changes to my life, lifestyle and habits than I care to count. Among other things, 2011 saw me leave IGN, my writing home for five years, as well as my actual home of eight years for one a few towns over. After my brother Matt, lead guitarist extraordinaire for The Frank Stalloners, moved to Denver to start a family of his own, 2011 also saw me throw myself headlong into a new band and musical project, The Greens Family Band, for the first time since the birth of the Stalloners almost an entire decade ago. I won’t bore you with the other radical changes that shook my life to the core last year, but trust me when I say they were many.
Perhaps most pertinent to the subject matter of this blog, though, is the fact that 2011 was the first year since at least 2004 in which I never once stepped foot in a comic book store. For someone who has been reading and collecting comics since the age of eight with only a brief hiatus from the hobby in high school, that’s a big fucking deal.
A quick note for the few people who may be reading this blog who have never before counted themselves as a regular at a comic book store: the local comic shop is a fascinating place dear to any serious comic fan’s heart. Not only is it a place for a comic fan to pick up his or her weekly fix every Wednesday, it’s also a headquarters and gathering place for like-minded enthusiasts to meet up and bullshit about what they’re reading, what’s great, what sucks, what future projects they’re excited about and everything in between.
As a young, rabid comics reader, my weekly trips to the comic shop were driven entirely by my desire to pick up the week’s new books and talk shop with my retailers and fellow fans. When, in 2006, I landed a job reviewing comics for IGN, that desire to head to the shop each week slowly but surely morphed into a need to, as it wasn’t at all uncommon for me to have to pick up ten to fifteen new books just to read everything I had to review and keep up on the goings-on in the Marvel and DC Universes. Don’t get me wrong – for the most part I still enjoyed my weekly Wednesday routine and interactions with my fellow geeks; I just didn’t really have a choice in whether or not I would go each week. That all changed when I stopped working for IGN and was suddenly confronted with the realization that not only did I not need to go to the store each Wednesday; I no longer wanted to.
I’m pretty confident that anyone, no matter how big a fan of the medium they might be, who is forced to read and write about enough mediocre to terrible superhero comics each week would likely experience the same fatigue I suffered after five years in the trenches as a weekly comics reviewer/commentator. There is only so many horrible issues of Countdown to Final Crisis or Uncanny X-Men, for instance, one can read and be forced to write about before DC and Marvel appear not as magical houses of ideas that generate fantastic new material each week, but massive, editorial-driven crap factories that shit out content 52 weeks out of the year because they have to.
As my required weekly reading list shrunk from a dozen or so issues to exactly zero overnight, I quickly realized there were only a handful of monthly titles being published that I just had to have the day they were released. Furthermore, with the exception of just a few superhero titles from Marvel and DC such as Grant Morrison and Scott Snyder’s Batman work and anything by Ed Brubaker or Jonathan Hickman, I found out that the majority of these must-read titles were creator-owned and/or independent original comics from publishers like Image, Boom, IDW, Marvel’s Icon imprint and DC’s Vertigo. And it just so happened that many of these publishers were on the very forefront of the digital revolution, making their new comics available online on the same date as their print release via sites like Comixology. Marvel and DC of course didn’t take too long to follow in their wake, making the need for me to head to the shop virtually non-existent, if you’ll excuse the pun.
What about that sense of camaraderie and community I loved about the comics shop, you might ask? I’ve found that the web, though lacking the intimacy and inter-personal relationships of the shop, has filled that role pretty well over the past year. A site like Comic Book Resources and its various blogs (Robot6 is a favorite) has more than enough information to keep me updated on what projects are coming down the pipeline. More importantly, the more casual, community-based sites like Comics Alliance supply the sort of witty, humorous-yet-informed banter I once got from the fellas behind the counter and my fellow customers. The knowledgeable and often hilarious writing of CA’s David Uzumeri and Chris Sims, in particular, has been invaluable in filling that particular hole in my comics reading/purchasing experience.
That’s all not to say that the comic industry hasn’t completely succeeded in replacing the comic shop experience with its new avenues of digital distribution. Far from it. For starters, the regular $2.99 price of an individual new issue is way too high – insanely high, actually – for the amount of entertainment it provides. For three bucks, I better damn well be able to hold the comic in my hand, share it with friends and not be reliant on the whims, DRMs and technological glitches of a publisher’s tech department in order to access the comic I supposedly “own.” The comic industry and the Big Two of Marvel and DC went digital because they were faced with the critical question of "adapt or die." I don’t think I’m stating anything but the obvious when I say they are far from done adapting before digital is a wholly fulfilling alternative to print and the local comic shop.
Will I ever get back into the weekly routine of visiting my comic shop each Wednesday? Probably. I’m not sure how much longer I can justify plopping down $2.99 for a comic without actually owning it in a tangible sense, and I do miss the interaction with my fellow readers. And although trade-waiting and purchasing in discounted bulk from Amazon has been a refreshing alternative to the weekly grind, I can still see myself falling back into my old habits eventually.
I’m just not in a rush and see no immediate need to visit my shop each week. And if Marvel and DC are truly concerned about the future economic health of brick-and-mortar comic shops, they might want to reconsider what types of comics they can publish in order to energize lapsed customers such as myself. But that, alas, is a topic for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment