Time to give up comics... again?
So yeah, I'm seriously considering quitting comic books again. I did it once before in the mid 1990s, when things really began to spiral out of control in the business, and now I'm considering it again for a very familiar reason.
I'm just not reading them anymore.
Like then, I've been continuing to buy for the last few years without reading everything I buy: a sort of constant "save it for later" thing. And then later doesn't get here. (I still have loads of stuff from the mid-1990s that I never found the time for, much less the more recent stuff.)
Over the last few months it's become more pronounced, to the point where even the ones I was normally reading on purchase have been stacking up. Part of this was no doubt due to the very intensive writing project I've been involved with since September or so, but now that it's over (at least, unless/until I can think of another story), I look at that stack of books and just don't care to go to the trouble of sorting them out and reading them.
And unlike the mid-1990s, we're now at the point where most individual issues are four bucks. $20 a week or more for a bunch of brightly colored paper that I'm not reading anymore seems wasteful and silly.
I'd feel badly for the guy who runs the shop I go to: his is one of the last non-chain comic stores left in town, and I like to support local business as much as the next person. But at the same time, I can't keep justifying the expense. The X-books are largely a long string of WTF in illustrated form, the Buffy comic has become all but unreadable, and the smaller books (like Keith's Farscape comics) are ordered in such tiny amounts that I only find one on the shelves about half the time, even when I show up on new release day.
So while part of me wants to see if Dove really can save the universe where big hitters like Superman have failed, and while part of me wants to see if Doug Ramsey 2.0 turns out to be the badass we all knew he could have become, and while part of me actually hopes that Joss Whedon will stop jerking his fans around (okay, so maybe there's no amount of hope in the world that'll stop that), I'm really thinking it might be time to cut my losses again. I can always go and pick up compilation volumes after the fact (or on Amazon) for stories I actually care about.
I've been discovering more and more things in my life that I need to let go of. Maybe this gets to be one of them.
I'm just not reading them anymore.
Like then, I've been continuing to buy for the last few years without reading everything I buy: a sort of constant "save it for later" thing. And then later doesn't get here. (I still have loads of stuff from the mid-1990s that I never found the time for, much less the more recent stuff.)
Over the last few months it's become more pronounced, to the point where even the ones I was normally reading on purchase have been stacking up. Part of this was no doubt due to the very intensive writing project I've been involved with since September or so, but now that it's over (at least, unless/until I can think of another story), I look at that stack of books and just don't care to go to the trouble of sorting them out and reading them.
And unlike the mid-1990s, we're now at the point where most individual issues are four bucks. $20 a week or more for a bunch of brightly colored paper that I'm not reading anymore seems wasteful and silly.
I'd feel badly for the guy who runs the shop I go to: his is one of the last non-chain comic stores left in town, and I like to support local business as much as the next person. But at the same time, I can't keep justifying the expense. The X-books are largely a long string of WTF in illustrated form, the Buffy comic has become all but unreadable, and the smaller books (like Keith's Farscape comics) are ordered in such tiny amounts that I only find one on the shelves about half the time, even when I show up on new release day.
So while part of me wants to see if Dove really can save the universe where big hitters like Superman have failed, and while part of me wants to see if Doug Ramsey 2.0 turns out to be the badass we all knew he could have become, and while part of me actually hopes that Joss Whedon will stop jerking his fans around (okay, so maybe there's no amount of hope in the world that'll stop that), I'm really thinking it might be time to cut my losses again. I can always go and pick up compilation volumes after the fact (or on Amazon) for stories I actually care about.
I've been discovering more and more things in my life that I need to let go of. Maybe this gets to be one of them.