TL; DR: On Giving Up Superhero Comics

Over the past few months I've started and stopped writing the same post a dozen times, but as March arrives and marks the 7th month of DC's New 52 effort, I had always planned to talk a bit about where I landed vis-a-vis DC Comics after half a year, so I've just held on to the mega-post on the topic.

And then, today, I read this blogpost from Bags and Boards.  He's been a writer on superhero comics and other comics for years, including working for Variety.  But in the post, he states that he's given up on the habits of superhero comics reading, and tied to that, the weekly trip to the comic shop.

I don't know that I'm giving up superheroes altogether, but the tone of the article and the white flag raising certainly resonates.  Frankly, if you're reading the site regularly, or you don't find all of my comics posts "too long; didn't read", none of this should come as a huge shock.  But I'm also starting to drift away from habits so ingrained that I am sure that for many of you who know me primarily through this blog or social media, you'd begin to think something was wrong.  And in some ways, I have to do some self-evaluation to wonder:  superhero comics, is it you or is it me?  And like all great romances that fail, we're likely both to blame.


In some ways, my motivations differ from Mr. McLean, and I haven't given up on superhero comics altogether.  And I don't see a future in the next decade where I'm not reading Superman in one form or another.  But its also realistic to say that the biggest impact the New 52 has had on me as a reader of superhero comics is that it enabled me to step back for a minute and re-assess everything about how I dealt with superhero comics and the habits that I'd developed over 15 years of weekly comic shop visits and more than 25 years of reading comics.

I've made no secret here of my concern regarding the quality and content of the DC relaunch, and as time has progressed, whatever illusions DC was able to cast to make it seem like they had all this well in hand have come apart, just as the overall effort is, from a creative perspective, more than a bit of a mess.  I don't watch sales, so I'll just assume the sales are still going strong.

But for me - the notion of keeping up and keeping pace with the mega-narrative of the DCU was part of the joy.  I might not have liked that DC killed off Ted Kord, but so much of the rest of the DCU was intact that overall, the DCU could take it.  And it could also open the door to Jaime Reyes.

But when I didn't have the DCU itself to fall back upon?

As a reader I'm being offered books with a crippling lack of enthusiasm behind them in many, many cases, being written by a weird mix of folks taking a paycheck or who are hack writers at best, who have managed to ingratiate themselves to the powers that be at DC either by long association with the formerly shamed editor Bob Harras or by not rocking the boat with Dan Didio (ie: just writing whatever Didio says).

Compounding the issue, rather than just starting at the beginning, DC is insisting we're 5 years into this mess.  Its an utterly baffling decision in a market that absolutely adores origin stories.  What is so hard about showing who Birds of Prey are and how they came to be?  Why would I want to do this?

Marvel I still look at, I will read Cap and Daredevil for the time being, but the endless cross-over that the Marvel U became lost my interest years ago now.  The very business of comics was so much more prevalent than the story, the characters, etc...  that I saw no particularly compelling reason to stick around.

Add in the point McLean makes about how long it takes to read these stories and the expense incurred in getting through a single storyline, and the thing that the DCNu Relaunch has shown me is that as a veteran reader who really has seen a lot:  I can stop doing this now.

I've mostly quit looking at a lot of the accouterments that went with comics, things like action figures, statues, etc... And since August I've been working slowly but intentionally in my home to reduce the morass of... stuff.  Clearing out boxes of unwanted comics, centralizing bins of unread issues and back issues.  Admitting I was never going to read this or that.  Sending some things to Salvation Army, selling some things, looking to put a lot of books up for sale on Amazon.  Clearing shelf space, clearing walls, etc...  having to ask "if this isn't dear enough for me to keep, how do I feel about everything else here?"

Its an oddly emotional experience, and, if I can try not to get too "real" here, its also been a fairly self-reflective process.  I can't say I necessarily like a lot of what I think the habits I'd gotten into say about me.  In pursuit of Supreme Comics Knowledge, I had put up a good display publicly of having some perspective regarding my bad habits, but behind the scenes, not so much.  And that's not even discussing or admitting how much money had been poorly spent.

But with the DC Relaunch timed, more by coincidence than anything, with my scheduled assessment of my collection/ comics/ however you want to describe it, I've had to reconsider a lot of things, not the least of which has been how many comics I've been purchasing for which I feel either nothing or which I haven't enjoyed.  Going through the stack as I did last August, the number of them that ended up either in the cardboard out-box from that stack was...  a lot.  Way, way too many.  No, I didn't look to see exactly what percentage it was, but it filled a fairly sizable cardboard box, and that's a lot of money represented.  And that's a problem for me (I won't generalize to the industry).

The formula sounds simple and its one of those things comic geeks yell at each other all the time online:  If you don't like it, don't buy it.  But that's easier said than done in the era of Blackest Night mini-series, line-wide cross-overs, etc...   (it doesn't hurt that DC and Marvel are great at producing a need for the one-off issues tied in with the event matter, but, man, they suck at the execution...  At $2.99-$3.99 a pop, that's unforgiveable)

All that said, I have always been someone to try things out.  And of late, the payoff on that approach has been startlingly low.

I am not a wealthy person.  I have had to think hard about what that means to have spent that money, not so much to regret the purchases, but to consider how that's going to change how I approach comics, superhero comics and all the associated super-stuff now.

The last few weeks I've picked up about two comics per week.  Hardly enough to justify a trip to the comics shop on a Wednesday.  And I'm okay with that.

I have one week in there where, somehow, DC has clustered together a large number of titles, but I'll be honest, I'm pretty much switching to trades on both DC and Marvel stuff at this point.  And we'll see how badly I think I actually need to read this Court of Owls mess in Batman now that DC has made it sprawl out over 15 titles.  Kind of makes my life easier if I choose to not to get on board.

And I know...  I know...  I'll be told how good that storyline is, and the internet folk will talk it up, but here's the difference:  I'm totally okay with knowing that story is out there, but I'm not going to be reading it.  And that's new.

For the target market of 18-25 year old white males with discretionary income:  enjoy it, and love it.  Try to understand the narrative is what makes it work, not the flash or artwork you'll look back on in ten years and see as hopelessly dated.  Try to learn as much about the medium as you can, and it will pay you back in ways you'll never expect.  Don't forgive sloppy work.  Ask the genre to be better than it is, because in many ways, its the refusal of the genre to continue to grow with those of us leaving superhero comics in our 30's (way, way longer than we ever expected to hang in there) and the creative laziness of the editors in charge that will mean that at some point, you're going to also start wondering why you should bother if this is all they're willing to do...

After a particularly good bender, Grant Morrison once suggested that the DCU was a living, aware entity that told us its stories and we were seeing glimpses of whatever that entity contained.  In some ways, I think Morrison was right.

One common thread you hear from writers of all fictional media is that, at some point, those characters take on a life of their own and begin speaking with their own voices and making their own motivations known.  And what is the DCU but a collection of those things, cultivated and crafted over 75 years?  That's thousands of years in print crammed into a timeline of the DCU that was always generous with its flexibility, its openness to change, and which gave up the best stories when writers and editors got the hell out of the way and let the tales unfold with the characters truest to themselves.

Can the caretakers hurt the DCU by asking it to be something its not?  By assuming that editorial decisions are their own?  In the abstract if not the metaphysical sense, I am inclined to believe so.

I do know that I'm coming to the end of what has been a multi-year love affair with comics, and that while I am in no way done with them, like all intense relationships, this one was bound to change.  I was going to grow older, and with that, priorities would change, my tastes and those driving the comics would diverge.  And here we are.

Perhaps its fitting that Morrison did write the last Superman story of my era in All Star Superman.  No matter what, I'll be able to think of that as the good-bye to what was in many, many ways.

I know its ending.  I'll keep hitting the store regularly, if not every week.  Here's to change.  And moving on. And here's to new adventures and the unknown.