What's Old is New to Me

If you've read even a small sampling of my blog posts, you know that I like comic books. What may surprise you is that I rarely buy new comics these days. I'll admit it's a strange confession from someone who aims to write and publish comics, but let me explain. First, let's take a quick look at what's on the stacks of single issues I still have at home to read:

Hero Alliance miniseries from Innovation (1989)...Superman and Superboy comics (1970s & 80s)...a few Spoof Comics like Daredame, X-Babes, and Justice Broads (early 90s)...an Angel miniseries written and drawn by John Byrne (2009)...various 3-D comics (mid-80s to early 90s)...the Just Imagine Stan Lee series from 2001...some Jerry Siegel Shadow comics (mid 60s)...and my tall stack of 70s and 80s horror comics from a variety of publishers.

Now, we'll just see what trade paperbacks and graphic novels are awaiting my reading time:

EC's Vault of Horror from 1952 (republished in hardcover by Dark Horse)...The Lindbergh Child by Rick Geary (2008)...Hitman: Local Heroes (1996)...Supergirl by Peter David, Vol. 2 (1997)...The Mutants by Berni Wrightson (1980, collecting material from as early as '66)...Cerebus: High Society (1986)...Marvel Comics Essential Thor, Vol. 3 (reprinting early-60s issues in B&W)...and that's just a scan of the top half of the stack.

You get the gist, though, right? Almost all the comics I'm reading these days are at least a decade or more old, and many go way back. Why? Put simply: they're just not producing the kinds of stuff I want to read.

There was a time when I had to have the newest issues, had to be on top of things as they were happening, so to speak. For example, I was in the thick of it when Superman fought Doomsday, then when he died and was replaced by four wannabes. I followed the Spider-Man Clone Saga like it was a TV soap opera. I was a DC Comics die-hard through Infinite Crisis, 52, and Countdown to Final Crisis. That kind of loyalty kept the cash register ringing and the "floppies" piling up.

But at some point, I stopped caring about the hottest books, about what was trending. Even before DC forced another reboot of its entire line in 2011, I had given up trying to keep up; it was too much work and way too expensive. And maybe, even if only subconsciously, I had grown tired of the huge, multi-issue storylines that crossed over into several different titles. I'm almost certain I'd become disenchanted with the overproduced digital artwork that was often assembled by committee. Whatever it was, I started stepping away from new mainstream corporate comics, and my reading habits did some branching out.

I didn't give up on superheroes, but I instead gravitated toward reprint collections of stories from the Golden and Silver Ages, back when those long-underweared mystery men could almost have been considered "relevant." I rediscovered an appreciation for the older style of comics storytelling--fast-paced adventures compressed into just a few pages of many panels. It wasn't realistic or cinematic, but it was satisfying fun.

Then, thanks to the 50%-off basement of my local comic shop, where they kept all the TPBs they wanted to unload, I got into the independent publishers, who tended to put out more complex and mature dramatic material than the majors did (or do). There was the darkly humorous Boneyard, about a regular guy who inherits a small-town cemetery and all the strange creatures who go with it; the gothically violent Magdalena, a kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer rip-off with a religious backdrop; and the epic Rex Mundi, set in an alternate reality where Catholic France is the world superpower. And even when they wrote about caped characters, the indies handled them differently. Both the police procedural Powers and the elegant Astro City focus on normal people in a world full of supers, while Alan Moore's Promethea takes an archetypal powered heroine and pushes her and the series' format as far as they can go, into abstraction.

While in that comic-shop basement, I was introduced to the big, cheap, B&W collections of DC's 1970s "mystery" titles and thus discovered my taste for horror comics. When those thick books ran out, I turned to eBay and started buying up all the raggedy floppies of decades past that I could get for close to a dollar a piece. Just like the old superhero comics, the stories in these creepy anthologies were short, brisk, and to the point. It's that style that I've emulated with my own comic scripts.

So, my tastes are, I admit, all over the map--I prefer old-fashioned comics now, but I still like cinematic-style stories, as long as they don't run on forever or require an army of writers and artists to produce them under corporate micromanagement. A major reason I got into such material was financial necessity: I just couldn't afford to keep buying Marvel and DC's new floppies hot off the rack, and, to be honest, I lost the inclination to do so anyway. But if more of the stuff I like--old-fashioned horror, socially conscious dark drama, and alternative superhero stories--makes its way into my LCS, I'll be more likely to buy it as it hits. After all, I need to support the creators whom I want to be my colleagues, right? Just don't expect me to forgo the classics.

#comics