I stopped after college when my student loans came due, probably around '92 or '93. Unfortunately, Ileft my comics at my grandmother's and I haven't seen them since my sister and her now ex were living there. That means they either got kifed or put in the garage and the squirrels have used them for nesting material. Unless I got lucky and grandma put them somewhere safe...
Jesse Gets Back Into Comics!!!!
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 On 03/04/2014 at 03:17 PM by Jesse Miller See More From This User » |
When I was younger, one of the ways I bonded with my father was our weekly trips to the local comic shop, a now defunct joint called Comic Crusade. This was during the comic boom of the 90s, and my dad figured that collecting comics was a decent way to invest in a sort of college fund. Image and Valliant Comics had just broken out, and certain books were starting to be worth some decent bucks; especially the newly coined “variant” editions.
Of course the boom was really a bubble, and the bubble burst before the decade was through. My dad and I laugh about it now – how we spent much more money than we could ever hope to make back – because we’ll always have the memories of our weekly pilgrimage to the local shop. It was something that we did together, just us.
Somewhere around the infamous Clone Saga I stopped reading comics. I’m pretty sure there are more than a few of you out there that may have dropped out around the same time. It was a pretty awful time (creatively and economically) for the comic biz. I couldn’t rationalize spending the money on books I wasn’t reading, and when I was, wasn’t enjoying. My dad and I stopped going to the shop and picked up other hobbies (I was playing hockey with my dad’s pickup league regularly around this time too) to supplant the comic shop ritual.
In the years since I’ve dropped into a local shop to pick up a book or two. World War Hulk piqued my interest, as did certain limited series like Mark Millar’s Wanted, but I couldn’t make the fulltime commitment to the hobby. I’d drop by for a few weeks and then stop. Drop by for a few more and then stop again.
With the birth of my daughter, however, I have found that I don’t have much time for my regular hobbies (brewing/drinking beer, videogames, just going out in general, etc…), and that comics suddenly become more appealing. I don’t really have the time to frequent my local comic shop (it’s a decent ways away), and I honestly don’t want to stuff my closet with more boxes of comics (I already have a ton that I pretty much just lug from place to place and never read), so what makes comics appealing again is digital age.
Digital comics wouldn’t have appealed to me when I was younger. I was more of a collector back then, and having all the physical books is just more appealing than not. But I’m older now, and I don’t really care about having dozens of physical books that I have to be super careful about reading (because I’m anal like that – my physical books have no cracks in the spines, you wouldn’t be able to tell that they’d ever been read), and taking up space. It just doesn’t matter to me anymore.
There are also too many advantages of digital for me to ignore:
- They don’t take up space
- I can read them pretty much anywhere – on my phone, on my computer, on my Kindle, etc…
- Generally they’re cheaper, or at least the same price as the physical book. Older books tend to go down in price, and you can usually find #1s for a buck or sometimes free.
- Finding back issues isn’t an issue. I don’t have to worry about having a hard time finding a book that came out weeks or months ago, and I also don’t have to worry about said book going up in price (the reverse is actually true – see #3 above)
So anyways, long story short I’m reading comics again and I’m reading them digitally. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be highlighting some of the series I’m reading and I hope to get some cool recommendations from you all out there.
Happing Gaming.
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