Funny books

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Is there a hobby you don’t enjoy anymore? Or, a hobby you don’t do anymore for some other reason?

It breaks my heart to admit this, but one hobby I no longer “do” is collecting and reading comic books. It’s not that I no longer enjoy comics. In fact, I think that superheroes are our modern day mythology. As it has been the case for the better part of the last 20 years, we are currently in a golden age of comic book based movies. Comic book-based TV shows aren’t too far behind; as the technology has caught up to the true creative visions for these characters.

I’ll try to keep up with what’s going on in both Marvel and DC Comics as much as I can. Thank God for the Internet. It makes it a lot easier to keep up with the monthly goings-on of my favorite superheroes.

I can have a few compelling reasons why I’ve no longer collect in, quite frankly, no longer joy, comic books:

Adulting

Right about the time I started college, I ran into a proverbial brick wall with my comic book collecting. I had other expenses that were popping up: rent, utilities, putting gas in my car. And that is to say nothing about having a social life and actually having a girlfriend at the time, who would later come to meet on your favorite blog as X1.

The point being, grown-up responsibilities got in the way. Unfortunately, something had to give. Along the same vein…

The books are too damn expensive

I haven’t bought a brand new comic book in several years, but looking at dccomics.com today, I see that the cover price of the current issue of action comics is $4.99. Five bucks for a comic book? That’s insane. Maybe I sound like an old man, but I remember when they were still printed on newsprint and went for $.60 an issue. Granted, that was back in 1985. It’s possible that the price of comic books has been commensurate with Inflation. but five bucks for monthly book just sounds steep. Perhaps am even bigger reason I’m no longer willing to pay $4.99 for a single issue or a comic book series is…

The stories just aren’t that good

Call it nostalgia, but give me the Batman stories of the 80s through the mid 90s over anything that has come out since. That the stories aren’t as compelling as they had previously been has made it easier for me to walk away from the hobby.

Give me The Dark Phoenix Saga. Give me A Death in the Family. Hell, give me Doomsday! But I cannot abide by Jason Todd, being resurrected in Batman and Gwen Stacy being brought back in Spider-Man via parallel Earths. On the other hand, “the winter soldier“ was a pretty kick ass story…

Too many reboots

I get it. Comic blog publishers need to do something to shock readers. They also need to do something to prompt readers to want to begin buying comic books again. There’s no better way to bring new readers to reset the established Canon in a particular book. Furthermore, there’s no better way to try to lure collectors in than “remembering” a monthly title with a brand new number one issue. Both Marvel and DC Comics are guilty of both of these charges, on multiple occasions.

Without a doubt, DC‘s most infamous example of rebooting their universe was 2011’s “the new 52“ initiative. I won’t go into a lengthy explanation of it here, but its purpose was to attract a new readers while staying true to the classic stories that long-term fans know and love. DC failed spectacularly on both these fronts. since then, the company has made new “course corrections” including. Rebirth, new justice, infinite frontier, dawn of DC, and DC All In.

My biggest beef with all of these reboots is the fact that I didn’t think they were necessary in the first place. New 52 tried to fix something that wasn’t even broken. After 25 years, DC, virtually reconciled everything after the “crisis on infinite earths”reboot of the company.

While Marvel has never tried a total reboot of their entire comic book universe, they have done some “soft reboots” of their own like Marvel Now, All New, All Different and Fresh Start. Granted, I’ve never been nearly as big of a fan of Marvel comic, as I was with DC, but the problem was the same with both companies. Both companies tried to fix something that wasn’t broken. And the case of Marvel, the rebels were always. “soft reboot” I’d never really reset the status quo.

At this point, it’s virtually impossible to tell which stories “count“ as part of each title’s continuity and which ones do not. I think I can speak for most long-time fans when I say that we don’t like being told that some of our most beloved comic stories do or do not count anymore. Since there have been so many reboots over the last 25 years, I feel like the industry has passed me by. .

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