Comics Are Cool And Shit
So I read comic books. Have done for...just a little more than thirty years now. And, as you would hope, my tastes have changed a bit in the last thirty years. And thank god, too, because I've met people who have been reading comics as long as I have whose tastes haven't changed. There are very few things that are quite as socially awkward as a conversation with a dude in his late thirties/early forties who still obsesses over Legion Of Superheroes continuity. And there are a lot of them. Just google the phrase "Legion Of Superheroes continuity," there are five or six essays in the first page of search results alone. Already getting off on a pointless tangent, I'll stop. Let's take that from the top again...
So I read comic books and have done so for a long ass time. And, after reading them for so many years, I just can't get into Spiderman or Green Lantern the way I used to. Or at all, actually. But there are a ton of great comics being published nowadays that not enough people know about. There are comics being created that should appeal to so many more readers than they actually do and one of the reasons for that is that 90% of most comics published are the same adolescent male fantasy (superheroes) shit, over and over and over again.
Another, equally important reason for this is that comics are entirely too hard to find. Sure, you can go into a borders and usually find some graphic novels and trade paper back collections, and that's cool but the selection is usually pretty limited and at least half of it will be the above-mentioned superhero shit. And, as anyone who's bothered to actually track one down has discovered, most comic specialty shops are total crap. Either they're selling 99% superhero product or the store is completely unorganized and the buyer can't find anything. Or the employee (which, more often than not is actually the owner) can't be pulled away from his PS2 game to actually help the customer find anything. Or the place just...smells. And nine times out of ten, the store is totally inaccessible or totally unappealing to women, thereby cutting themselves off from 50% of their potential market. Could you imagine how much Hollywood would shit if theaters smelled like McDonald's and ass and every time a girl walked in she'd be ogled and leered at by three guys standing in the corner, holding vaguely pornographic material in their hands? And I got off on another tangent there, sorry.
So the point is there are a lot of great comics being put out at the moment - more than at any other time in recent memory in fact - and more people should be checking them out. You know how it is when you go see a movie that totally just kicks you in the ass and it's the best movie you've seen in the last ten years and you want to tell everyone you know to go see it? That's what is going through my head at the moment, and I feel that way at least once or twice a month.
So I'm going to try something new here. New for me, anyway. I don't really want to start reviewing comics online, there are already a ton of sites that do that, some of which do it really well. And I don't want this to turn into a list of The Greatest Comics Ever Written, Jesus Christ, Why Don't You Own Them?! Again, there are plenty of sites that do that already. On top of which I'm only interested in talking about new product (or just new to me - I just discovered how great THE WALKING DEAD is about two or three years after everyone else has.). So basically what I have in mind is this: Whenever I read a comic that amazes me or really stands out as excellent I'm going to talk about it here.
And I was going to start this whole thing off by talking about Love and Rockets but I've now rambled on way too much so I'll be doing that either later on today or sometime this weekend. And yes, I could totally just rewrite the above into two succinct paragraphs but that would completely violate the whole stream of consciousness thing I do here. So...more to come.
So I read comic books and have done so for a long ass time. And, after reading them for so many years, I just can't get into Spiderman or Green Lantern the way I used to. Or at all, actually. But there are a ton of great comics being published nowadays that not enough people know about. There are comics being created that should appeal to so many more readers than they actually do and one of the reasons for that is that 90% of most comics published are the same adolescent male fantasy (superheroes) shit, over and over and over again.
Another, equally important reason for this is that comics are entirely too hard to find. Sure, you can go into a borders and usually find some graphic novels and trade paper back collections, and that's cool but the selection is usually pretty limited and at least half of it will be the above-mentioned superhero shit. And, as anyone who's bothered to actually track one down has discovered, most comic specialty shops are total crap. Either they're selling 99% superhero product or the store is completely unorganized and the buyer can't find anything. Or the employee (which, more often than not is actually the owner) can't be pulled away from his PS2 game to actually help the customer find anything. Or the place just...smells. And nine times out of ten, the store is totally inaccessible or totally unappealing to women, thereby cutting themselves off from 50% of their potential market. Could you imagine how much Hollywood would shit if theaters smelled like McDonald's and ass and every time a girl walked in she'd be ogled and leered at by three guys standing in the corner, holding vaguely pornographic material in their hands? And I got off on another tangent there, sorry.
So the point is there are a lot of great comics being put out at the moment - more than at any other time in recent memory in fact - and more people should be checking them out. You know how it is when you go see a movie that totally just kicks you in the ass and it's the best movie you've seen in the last ten years and you want to tell everyone you know to go see it? That's what is going through my head at the moment, and I feel that way at least once or twice a month.
So I'm going to try something new here. New for me, anyway. I don't really want to start reviewing comics online, there are already a ton of sites that do that, some of which do it really well. And I don't want this to turn into a list of The Greatest Comics Ever Written, Jesus Christ, Why Don't You Own Them?! Again, there are plenty of sites that do that already. On top of which I'm only interested in talking about new product (or just new to me - I just discovered how great THE WALKING DEAD is about two or three years after everyone else has.). So basically what I have in mind is this: Whenever I read a comic that amazes me or really stands out as excellent I'm going to talk about it here.
And I was going to start this whole thing off by talking about Love and Rockets but I've now rambled on way too much so I'll be doing that either later on today or sometime this weekend. And yes, I could totally just rewrite the above into two succinct paragraphs but that would completely violate the whole stream of consciousness thing I do here. So...more to come.
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