I’ve read a few graphic novels but I’m not a very visual person. Going between pictures and words doesn’t really appeal to me. I’d rather just read a narrative with words.
I read comic books as a kid up through my mid-teens when, to follow a story, you’d have to buy 5 comics that you’d never normally read. I don’t want to buy a copy of Fantastic Four, Spider Man, Ghost Rider, and The Silver Surfer just so I can know what happened between X-Men #343 and #344*. I’m sure somebody thought it was a brilliant way to sell more comics but it fucked them out of at least one reader, and from the sound of it quite a few more.
*Numbers pulled out of my ass, I have no idea what issues I was reading at the time.
Even when I was a kid, comics never had any interest for me. I’d read them if a friend had some but I always preferred regular books.
Never been a comic book reader. Never had any interest. Still don’t. ETA: I also prefer long books to short books.
I am generally this way, too. Even as a kid, I rarely examined the pictures in books very closely. However, in some cases, the illustrations and the story just flow together.
On the other hand, if the wrong artist is used, or the wrong style, that can absolutely ruin a graphic novel for me. Gaiman’s Mr. Punch has some of the ugliest illustrations and lettering I’ve seen, and I was deeply disappointed. It’s probably a good story, but the graphics are so bad that I can’t get past them.
I guess I’m not in the target demographic because I do read comic books.
People need to remember Sturgeon’s Law. Obviously there’s a lot of crap comic books out there. But there’s a lot of good ones out there too. The crap to quality ratio is no worse than any other entertainment media.
As others have said, the medium just doesn’t work for me. I lose my place (especially when they get creative and don’t go left to right and top to bottom with the panels), I read the words and miss the picture clues, or I watch the pictures and miss what’s going on in the words - I just don’t seem to be able to switch on both sides of my brain at once (although I don’t have nearly as much trouble watching movies with subtitles.)
I’ve tried, gods, I’ve tried. My (ex)husband even teaches university courses on comics and graphic novels! It would have made him a very happy person if I had been able to get through Promethea. Or more than 60 pages of Sandman. Or - and y’all know what a Whedon fan I am - *Buffy *or *Angel *or *Firefly *in their comics incarnations.
I love the *ideas *behind all of these, and if they were in novel form, I’d eat 'em with a spoon. But I can’t get into the format of comics.
I think I did make it through The Fountain, but it was *work *to do so. I don’t read for work, I read for pleasure.
I read comic books as a little kid up through about age 14 or 15. I was a big collector of Golden age comics also. I’m 57 now. I’m not making fun of older readers of comics but when I started to date girls comics just didn’t hold my interest anymore. At about that age I got into reading books and comics just didn’t hold up to a novel.
I used to be a reader, but it went through phases. I read regularly until around 1968; started reading again around 1972, came back around 1991 (due to Sandman), and stopped after Sandman finished. I do pick up graphic novel collections (like Fables) to catch up on some things.
Why don’t I pick it up? Lots of reasons:
- The Dark Knighting of comics. When they gave Captain Marvel a dark and tormented past, they went too far. I don’t mind a little gritty, but, man these things are tediously dark. And there’s no variety. Why not have a hero who isn’t tormented by life and actually has a little bit of fun?
- Continuing stories. You have to start at the beginning to follow things (especially, when, like me, you hate coming into things in the middle). Also, if you pick up a book, the odds are when you get to the end you only get a cliffhanger. I was not a big fan of continuing stories even in the best of times (though some comics managed to transcend it), and I’m not a fan of being forced to buy more issues just to find out how things resolves.
- Backstory. Even the basic superheroes now have backstories that are so convoluted and complex that it’s just too much effort to get into it.
- Lack of outlets. The only comic book store is about five miles away, in an area that’s completely out of my way. That’s not an issue if I start getting into comics, but the hurdles are just too big for me to want to go there just on the off chance there will be something I like.
- **Expense. ** Because of #2 above, comics are a big investment. A six-issue arc is $24, nearly as much as a hardcover book. If I’m going to spend that sort of money, I would want a more permanent format (like getting the graphic novel collection). Bonus: if the comic isn’t any good, there’s probably not going to be a graphic novel.
Never been a comic book reader.
Which is too bad, because I like the concept of comic books (and graphic novels), but I’m another one who can’t seem to follow the narrative when it is all chopped up and alternating between words and pictures. Which I’ve always found strange, because I’m very into the visual arts and I do get the quality of some of the classic comic book illustrators, and I love to read, I read all the time.
Trying to read them makes me almost seasick, it’s that strong of a reaction. It was like that when I was a kid, and it’s like that now that I’m an adult.
I read some comic books when I was younger. That’s it.
I love comics; I think they are as legitimate an art as anything else you care to name. However, I don’t buy comics because most of the best series are free online webcomics.
Also, I loved my X-Men when I was a kid, but I’m not really interested in picking up a new issue and seeing a new team full of people I don’t care about fighting new villains I don’t care about. I want to see the early 90’s Blue and Gold teams taking on Magneto, but if they were still doing that, then they have surely stagnated for the last decade and a half. I’m not really sure that Marvel could have done anything differently-- they have to keep innovating new storylines and encounters, but then they alienate their old readers.
This may eventually be a problem for webcomics, as even the longest have only been running several years, and they’re bound to run into the same issues. Anything that doesn’t run in the “comic strip” format is probably better off having a determined end.
I read them as a kid. Then the price went up. And maybe I got more sophisticated. At least, it became clear to me why the artists are the stars of the industry, rather than the writers. That struck me as unjust when I was reading them, but eventually I began to recognize where many of the stories I was reading were borrowed from. For instance, “The Girl from Yesterday” (Wonder Woman #38) rips off “Great Expectations”, and “Claws of the Emperor Eagle” and “Death at Rainbow’s End” (Brave and the Bold #129 & 130) is a pastiche of “Maltese Falcon” and “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”.
It seems that most people who keep an interest into adulthood are really into the art and artists, but I never was, particularly.
I want to emphasize this. I quit comics around 1986 (because I had no way of knowing that Watchman and Sandman were around the corner) after 30 years of buying thousands. That was just after the Secret Wars-type nonsense began and also because that era in mainstream comics was boring and trite. Everything had been done to death and the era of rebooting to get around that hadn’t started.
But I also could no longer stand Chris Claremont torturing teenagers in every issue of the X-Men (and various others). Comics were supposed to be cheesy fun. That’s how Stan Lee drew an older audience into them with 60s Marvel. They were a hoot. You could dip into melodrama at times for variety and nobody beat Stan at melodrama. Both were fun, fun, fun, to quote Brian Wilson.
Starting with Claremont and picked up by John Bryne and a few others, comics started getting not only darker but bloodier. Characters got tortured. Villains grew psychotic. Batman became psychotic. The 90s were known as the decade of torture porn before it moved into the movies. The same audience feasted on both.
The problem was that you could be a regular moviegoer and skip all the torture porn but for a while you couldn’t be a superhero comics reader and find alternatives. The independents were even worse because they had to find their niche and that niche was to outdo anything that was to be found in the mainstream.
While graphic novels can deal with any subject, comic books are interchangeable in the public’s mind with superheroes. Superheroes really are all-American good guys and don’t work well as psychotic torture machines.
Yes, but that’s reality, sayeth the fanboys. Real villains would hurt the heroes, not place them in giant death traps for them to figure a way out of. Torture is real. No. Nothing about comics are real. You know why they call things comic bookish? Because that’s not a compliment. If you want real, almost any medium in existence does it better than superhero comic books.
I know there have been many attempts, like the ones mentioned above, to do kid-friendly comics. I think it’s too late. We had few alternatives to comics as kids; today there are zillions. And publishers can’t afford to offend the fanboys because that’s almost the entirety of their audience.
I’m not Susanann. I’m as well-read and broadly-read as anybody here and I’ll put up my knowledge of high art in general against anybody as well. I’d love it if comics were fun again. I read many of the compilations that local libraries carry and every once in a while I’ll find a title or author who does it right. It’s not just that you can’t expect every book to be good. It’s that too many books are not merely bad but offensively stupid in too many ways.
The Dark Knight was interesting as a one-shot. When it became the baseline for everyone to exceed, comics lost their heart.
I kinda thought Dark Knight was pretentious and overwrought. Well, plus it would have been better if Superman had been dead before the events in the story (and his death, in part, led to the neo-fascist urban nightmare depicted), rather than have him in there acting like an idiot and Batman’s punching bag. That part of it strikes me as akin to fan fiction where the character the author likes beats up the character the author hates, eve if it makes no sense at all.
Anyway, I read comics regular up until 1993 or so. Gradually eased out when they started getting overly expensive and less interesting.
Well, I was never really into comics as a kid—I don’t know why. It wasn’t like they weren’t available, or I (or my parents!) had any objection to them, or that I had any special dislike of superheroes. It just never really came up—I think I bought a Punisher War Zone; a reprint of an old Weird Science comic; and a couple of Ren & Stimpy comics, total, but that’s it. I can’t explain it.
Anyway, I actually really got in to comics when I was…very late teens? Early twenties? I can’t really remember. And I can’t really remember the reasons why, either, which is even weirder. But it probably had to do with all the movie and TV adaptations that really started up in the 90s, which I did and still do love and follow.
But my personal comic buying has fallen off the last couple of years for a few reasons:
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Money, time, and personal issues. 'Nuff said, right? But this was, honestly, really only a major deal for a year or two, and has improved since then. So why haven’t I really started up, again?
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No titles I really wanted to follow. I’ve diligently followed a few, but they’d mostly wrapped up, or been cancelled. There are a few others that are—or were—still running, but either didn’t grab me that much that I’d really miss reading them, or that had such drawn out publishing schedules that they were easy to forget, and much easier not bothering to look for. Sadly, I’ve probably missed new ones in the interim that’ve come and gone because I wasn’t going out and looking for them—and this is something I honestly regret.
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This one’s really more subjective, but…the big two comics worlds of DC and Marvel (which, all things considered, are still the really big draws) have been getting kind of unenjoyable the last couple of years. Lots of big crisis crossovers; lots of characters getting killed off or screwed over pointlessly, or getting tweaked to satisfy the writer or editor’s personal sense of nostalgia, stuff like that, really don’t seem like something I want to get invested in (financially, or for my entertainment. I take my escapism seriously!). And now I’m finding it’s harder to break back into the stories now that I’ve missed out on a bunch of probably unenjoyable, but necessary to the plot stuff.
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This one’s really subjective: I simply have weird tastes. That’s going to effect which titles I’m going to like in the first place, and it’s probably going to effect which issues I like out of those. Which means I’m going to be overly discriminating. After that, you have the moral and political aspects. There’s a real overriding sense of moralism in the major publishers’ settings which, although it can certainly be justified—like you’re aiming at a younger audience; or the entire point of the character is tied up in an idealistic principle; or the simple reason that if you did the pragmatic or sane thing, you’d kill the story, and there’d be nothing more to write—but to me, it’s frustrating, and rubs the wrong way. What can I say? I don’t feel the way the comics do, or agree with it. I don’t really find fault in people who do like it, and I sure as hell don’t expect them to change to suit me, but I don’t especially enjoy reading it for fun.
Then, politics…okay, of course I understand this. This is a very politically charged time in history, for some odd reason, and it’s almost inevitable that this is going to find it’s way into any medium, and comics are no exception. But my own politics are…weird. Not unique, probably, but uncommon enough that I don’t have a lot of company, especially in the entertainment field. That’s fine enough, if a little lonely, and I really prefer my entertainment apolitical anyway. So when political messages—which, no matter what side they come from, are almost certain to come along with something I disagree with vehemently—start hammering their way into the stories, and, it often seems, aren’t especially well executed, or even adapted well to the setting, because they have a “message” or an axe to grind, well…yeah, well, I think I’m just going to stick to technical manuals till this blows over.
- Here’s the weird one…what with the internet and all, it’s possible to be a comics fan, and keep passably up-to-date with the goings on of the stories without actually buying the comics. A bit like being a fan of the heroes and tales of Greek mythology, without actually having to learn ancient Greek, and go to a national museum to read the myths from a crumbling papyrus in an argon-filled case.
The thing is…I still like comics. And with the big companies, I like the settings—characters, the worlds, the adventures. But increasingly, it feels like I like the concepts more than their execution in print.
Because I like to have my stories wrapped up in a neat bow, and comics don’t do that.
To get the story, I have to buy how many comics? Over how many weeks/months/years? If I really want to read it, I wait for the graphic novel so I can get the whole story at once.
I’m fine with sequels, and lets continue the story onwards, but the plot for that one book/game/comic must be wrapped up in someway at the end while being open enough to continue and don’t just end it and leave it wide open so it didn’t really end…
So between that and the $$ involved, not worth it for me.
I read a bunch of X-Men a friend lent me for like a month when I was a teenager.
I don’t read comic books because to me they are lame and for losers. Or little kids.
I do watch movies based on comic books, for the most part at least. I couldn’t watch The Spirit because it looked too lame, but other than that I’ve seen (or plan to see) just about all mainstream comic book movies made in the past decade.
Just not interested. My best friend when I was a kid used to buy Archie comic books and I’d read them and give them back to her, but I always preferred “real” books. I love stories, dialogue, description, character development. When I read I need more than what comic books have to offer.
I used to be a comix fiend. I now read webcomics. Much cheaper. I will read comic books, but I don’t buy six a week anymore.