Comic book geekery

It's been a long time since I've bought a comic book. I've continued to read them and still enjoy them, but having them laying around is more trouble than they're worth. So I content myself with reading them in Borders over an orange-mango Cremekula or downloading them.

Not to mention, I think the medium is dying.

It's sad to think that this hobby that I enjoyed so much for a large part of my formative years will likely not exist in another 10 years. There are just too many distractions and comic books can't compete. There are too many video games to play, movies and tv shows to watch, gambling games to try to maximize expected value, porn sites to browse-- these are all hobbies that rely on introverted, near-auticstically intelligent, obsessive teenagers for their lifeblood and comics have to take a back seat to these more immediately gratifying hobbies.

The comic book industry only has iteself to blame. When speculators struck on comic books as a possible investment vehicle, the publishers were only too happy to milk them for all they were worth with multiple covers, special editions, and relaunches of titles starting the numbering at #1 again hoping speculators would buy and hoard boxes of them. For example, Marvel renumbered Iron Man at #1 for "volume 2" sometime in about 2000-- then inexplicably started at #1 again 13 months later for "volume 3". After the novelty of a new numbering system wore off, they wanted to reconnect to the original numbering of the Iron Man series so the comics would sport TWO issue numbers-- so the same issue would be Iron Man #80 (for volume 3) and #498 (for volume 1). Confused yet? I was long gone from being a regular comic book buyer by then. It didn't help that the collectors made the publishers shift comics from an intentionally cheap form of entertainment printed on newsprint to more expensive 'books' printed on longer-lasting paper stock. Comics were $0.65 each when I started buying them in the mid-80's and they're $3.99 now.

Not to mention that there hasn't been a good run of a monthly title in a while. All of the really good comic moments either happened in the silver age from 1960-1988 or in one-shot/miniseries. Too many of the new comics today are re-interpretations of these events, remapped to today's world. Not that these new interpretations aren't entertaining but orignality is severly lacking. The novelty of seeing modern Gwen Stacy in Ultimate Spider-Man's 21st century life versus the hip 60's chick wears off quickly.

I wonder if Marvel and DC will continue to be comic book publishers. Marvel has already made strides into producing their own movies instead of licensing their characters to others to make movies. The huge success of Iron Man shows that that may be a viable alternative to comics for them. They already redid The Hulk and a new Punisher movie is coming. Publishing comics may be a loss-leading strategy just to keep their characters in the public eye until they make their next movie.