How do you treat your comics?
Do you keep buying books you don’t like, just to keep a set? Do you read once, and then bag and board them? Do you not even read and just go straight to the slabbing? Are they an investment for you, or is it just a hobby?
For me, monthly comics or floppies or whathaveyou are disposable entertainment in every sense of the word. I don’t own any longboxes and I have maybe three dozen comics in bags and boards. They are ones I’ve owned since I was a kid (X-Men #1 with the sweet gatefold cover) or books that I’m planning on turning into custom hard/softcover trade paperbacks, like Flex Mentallo or Wildcats 3.0.
My floppies tend to get pretty beaten up. I tend to keep them in the plastic bag from the comic shop, and those bags get stacked up in a closet. When the stack is high enough for me to notice it, I go through, clear out the comics I don’t want to keep or plan to convert to trades on (most of them) and either junk or donate them.
That’s half a lie. Comics are hard to give away.
Anyway, floppies are pretty much completely disposable to me. If I lived in a world where we got between two and four fat graphic novels about each character with an ongoing series a year, I’d be pretty happy. Make them hardcovers and I’d be in bliss.
It isn’t that I don’t like floppies, so much as I just prefer books with solid spines, maybe a dust cover, and maybe even a slipcase. Floppies are great, and I’ve been buying them since I was a kid and buy them to this day. In the long run, though, I like being able to read a complete story without picking six different issues out of the closet. I want it on my own terms.
I guess that’s the crux of how I view my comic-reading habits. I want to be comfortable. I want things on my terms. I want to be able to read stories how I want, when I want, with a minimum of effort. For me, this means trades. I can stack them up on a bookshelf (or beside my bed…) and pull one off and get a done-in-one story. Reading that in floppies would require more effort.
Again, I’m not dissing floppies. They serve a great purpose and are probably 100% necessary in the scheme of things, but I feel like I could do without them. The occasional one shots are super cool, like the New Frontier Special or the rumored Losers movie special (whenever that gets off the ground). Some series need the monthly format to be able to survive. Others use the monthly format for pacing purposes.
It’s kind of interesting. I think that I treat floppies and trades the same way in the long term. I’ve got a stack of “To Read” books by my bed that’s been there since Wondercon a few weeks back. I’ve got a stack of floppies a mile high in my closet. It’s disposable entertainment at work: I love comics, but believe that they are meant to be read, rather than saved. Beat them up, stick them in your back pocket, lend them to friends, do whatever you like to them. Just read them and enjoy them, however you prefer to do so.
It’s all about the love, isn’t it? My belief in comics can be summed up with this rambly quote from Flex Mentallo, also known as the best love letter to comics ever.
“Totally amazing names… I mean, when you think about it… they’re, like, archetypal… they come right up from the depths, those things… how can they say that stuff’s stupid? Why do people get so ashamed of things? …I mean, I really love those comics…”
I love comics.
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