Monday, June 14, 2004
Comic Relief
I love comic books. So why, after a near 20-year collecting habit, do I not miss them?
I started collecting comic books sometime in 1984 when I was 12. I started off small, reading "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "The Uncanny X-Men." After all, I was only 12 and didn't have a lot of money. But that was okay, because they didn't cost a lot. Back in the summer of '84, comics cost 60 cents. Over time, my obsession grew, and by my peak in the mid-90's I was spending an average of $60 A WEEK on my hobby. But then something happened. Comics became ultra-popular and it became a "collector's market." Translation: the companies realized sales were at an all-time high, but not because of people like me who actually READ the damn things, but rather because of the people who were buying multiple copies of the same book as an investment, like baseball cards. So they started catering to THAT crowd, and printing multiple variations of the same comic with different covers so people would buy more copies. Meanwhile, important things like STORY and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT fell by the wayside in favor of CHEAP GIMMICKS. Even the artwork suffered. Instead of telling a story, every page looked like a pin-up, designed to boost the re-sale of the original artwork. After all, who wants to buy the original pencil drawings of two guys talking for 9 small panels, when you can buy 1 huge panel of two muscleheads pounding the crap out of each other? Also, if you wanted to follow the adventures of the X-Men, you couldn't just buy "The Uncanny X-Men," you also had to buy "The New X-Men," "X-Factor," "X-Force," "X-Man," "Wolverine," "The New Mutants," and it kept going and going and going. If you didn't buy them all, you were basically screwed.
Eventually the collector's stopped buying comics, because they realized that all the books they bought in the mid-90's were worthless. How can something be valuable if a company prints over a million copies of it, and every single person who wanted one already owns 5 copies? But it was too late. Comics were already ruined for me, and I quit cold turkey last year. Sure, the rationale was that I was trying to buy a house and needed to save money wherever I could (comics by this point had gone from the 60 cents I paid in '84 to an average of 3 dollars and change), but the truth is I just didn't enjoy it anymore.
I started collecting comic books sometime in 1984 when I was 12. I started off small, reading "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "The Uncanny X-Men." After all, I was only 12 and didn't have a lot of money. But that was okay, because they didn't cost a lot. Back in the summer of '84, comics cost 60 cents. Over time, my obsession grew, and by my peak in the mid-90's I was spending an average of $60 A WEEK on my hobby. But then something happened. Comics became ultra-popular and it became a "collector's market." Translation: the companies realized sales were at an all-time high, but not because of people like me who actually READ the damn things, but rather because of the people who were buying multiple copies of the same book as an investment, like baseball cards. So they started catering to THAT crowd, and printing multiple variations of the same comic with different covers so people would buy more copies. Meanwhile, important things like STORY and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT fell by the wayside in favor of CHEAP GIMMICKS. Even the artwork suffered. Instead of telling a story, every page looked like a pin-up, designed to boost the re-sale of the original artwork. After all, who wants to buy the original pencil drawings of two guys talking for 9 small panels, when you can buy 1 huge panel of two muscleheads pounding the crap out of each other? Also, if you wanted to follow the adventures of the X-Men, you couldn't just buy "The Uncanny X-Men," you also had to buy "The New X-Men," "X-Factor," "X-Force," "X-Man," "Wolverine," "The New Mutants," and it kept going and going and going. If you didn't buy them all, you were basically screwed.
Eventually the collector's stopped buying comics, because they realized that all the books they bought in the mid-90's were worthless. How can something be valuable if a company prints over a million copies of it, and every single person who wanted one already owns 5 copies? But it was too late. Comics were already ruined for me, and I quit cold turkey last year. Sure, the rationale was that I was trying to buy a house and needed to save money wherever I could (comics by this point had gone from the 60 cents I paid in '84 to an average of 3 dollars and change), but the truth is I just didn't enjoy it anymore.
