Used to be a comic reader
The reason why I don’t read comics anymore is because I’ve learned to masturbate to many more things, things I can get easily online and for free.
I began reading comics because I thought the girls were hot. Once I could look at both hot and naked girls online, I never went back
Wait. You masturbated to the girls in comic books?
Even the Marvel Swimsuit Special Issues isn’t anywhere near…
I assume you were really young. Or did you have a source of comic books that were more like Tijuana Bibles?
Once I outgrew Archie & Jughead, I outgrew the medium.
Honestly, it just seems childish to me.
mmm
This is why guys don’t like chick flicks. How many straight males are there portrayed with “activities and interests separate from the main female characters” in Sex and the City, Eat Pray Love, etc…?
This isn’t anything unique to women. Movies targeted to guys focus on guys, movies targeted to women focus on women. Stop the presses.
But she is right about one thing, Hollywood execs are SHOCKED every single time a movie that’s classified as a chick flick does well. No matter how many times it happens or how well-positioned the movie is (don’t kid yourself Hollywood, a Sex and the City movie was ALWAYS a sure thing) it is the most amazing outcome in the world to the execs.
I used to spend something on the order of $25-$50 on comic books a week, until I lost my job. Since then I just haven’t been able to afford it. I do still occasionally pick up the odd graphic novel or collected book with present money, but I can no longer do the weekly thing.
Once I’m back in the black though, I’ll have had some time to consider my habits. I’ll definitely want to keep up with my favorite series again, but I’m not sure about the format. Collected books are a lot easier to keep nice and organized on bookshelves. And electronic files would be a lot more portable and take up less space. So I haven’t quite decided what I’ll do when I start buying again.
Some of us are old enough to have hit puberty before the internet. I won’t mention any names, but I know a few who masturbated to comic books, clothing catalogs, 8-bit video games, Judy Blume novels, and National Geographic magazines. If you are a horny teenager and don’t have the vast pornographic resources that today’s youth have, you make do with imagination and a tiny bit of stimulating material.
My problem is with that stupid Bechdel test. As if it is some kind of objective good and any movie without fully realized women in it is bad. Guess war movies are worthless, then, right? And even worse is the framing about how unjust this is to women all while being completely blind to the undeniable fact that movies for women fail this same test in spectacular fashion.
I got seriously into comic books in college (mid-to-late 1980s). At my peak, I was reading most of the Marvel titles, and a few DCs, as well. I pretty much got out of it by 1990, for a couple of reasons.
I had certain titles and creators which I really enjoyed. Walt Simonson on Thor. Chris Claremont on X-Men. John Byrne on Fantastic Four and Alpha Flight. Iron Man in general. Eventually, those creators moved off of those books, and the particular chemistry which I enjoyed was gone – in some cases, such as Thor, I came to hate what happened to the books. (Speaking of Thor, a friend gave me a stack of old issues from the late 1970s – before Simonson had begun his run on the book. They were terrible. What I decided was that Simonson’s run on Thor had been the outlier…it stunk before he got on it, and it returned to stinkiness after he left.)
Related to #1: Marvel’s strategy seemed to be to put a new creative team on most of the books every year or so. And, in every case, the new creative team had to put their own thumbprint on the book. The poor Hulk was the one who suffered the most. “He’s green and dumb!” “No, now he’s gray and dumb!” “Now he’s green again, but he’s smart!” “Now he’s green and smart, but he’s evil!” GAH!
As others have noted, the crossover thing got absurd. If I wanted to follow a story in X-Men, I had to buy a half-dozen other titles that month?
They got expensive, rapidly. When I started buying them, a standard book cost 65 cents, and the only special issue was usually the Annual, which was a couple of bucks. Within a few years, the price of an issue had doubled (or more), and there were all sorts of special issues and limited-run series.
I guess I’m still a fan, after a fashion. I go see most of the comic book movies, and I occasionally pick up an issue of Iron Man or one of the X-Men titles (though I’ll be damned if I can even begin to figure out what’s happened to the characters in the past 20 years).
The thing is, MOST media is targeted to males, and females are expected to be interested in the same thing. That is, a great many comics have female characters which are drawn with huge boobs and wearing next to nothing, even though the male characters are drawn with fairly normal physiques and are wearing regular street clothing. That is, if the men are wearing jeans and tshirts, the women are wearing string bikinis. And the creators are genuinely shocked that women are (usually) not into looking at other women. I’ve heard men express astonishment that most women just aren’t into lesbian porn.
I haven’t seen the two movies you’ve referenced, and I rather doubt that I ever will, even when they are on cable, precisely because they are targeted at what I consider to be the Oprah audience.
Way back when the SDMB had just transitioned to the internet board, a bunch of the old AOL regulars decided to get together. One guy says great, let’s go to Hooters. I asked him why Hooters? Because it’s got great scenery! he replies. Ummm, slightly over half of the people planning to attend are of the female persuasion, what’s Hooters got for THEM? I ask. Oh, ummm, I guess they wouldn’t want to go there? he mutters. Now, not all men are like this…but the default audience, the default PERSON is assumed to be male, and that’s what I’m bitching about. When I was growing up, I read mostly those boys’ adventure stories, because I couldn’t stomach the stories written for girls. And it would have been nice to have had a FEMALE main character who went off and had adventures, instead of a female main character who worried about her complexion and whether or not she’d be able to snag a boyfriend.
What I’d like to see is interesting characters who could be EITHER sex, without changing the storyline too much. In some cases, the sex of the character is absolutely vital…for instance, in Y: The Last Man, the sexes of the characters are pretty much determined by the premise. The story NEEDS the main character to be male. In many stories, though, the main character(s) could easily be female, with only a few little changes. In Sandman, some of the Endless are portrayed as female, some as male. Desire is portrayed as omnisexual, which makes sense. But throughout the Sandman series, there are strong female characters who exist in their own right, not through being a love interest or girlfriend.
I’m about the same vintage as **Kenobi 65 **and liked many of the same books, such as ALPHA FLIGHT and THE NEW MUTANTS. Lots of my friends in college also read them and we talked about them like we were a live SDMB or TWOP. But around 1990, I just stopped pretty much cold turkey. Here’s why:
Graduating college meant moving away from the friends, although most of us stayed in the general Boston area. Going to New England Comics in Harvard Square and picking up the newest subs in my Own Special Folder with my name on it in the filing cabinet was still fun, but as my friends gave them up and I had nobody to talk to about them, the thrill wore off. No Interwebs.
The late 80s saw the last big Boskone fan-run conventions and the rise of slicker, big-ticket, big-celeb ones run by commercial interests who quickly monopolized the top stars and writers and pushed out the more bookish yet wide-ranging cons that we all liked. I mean, at Boskone you could listen to Wendy Pini at 10:00 and twelve hours later have a beer in your hand singing along with Clam Chowder in the same function room. The cons became mostly dealer’s rooms with guests an afterthought, and the guests picked up on it. I saw less middle-aged professorial genial types and more squealing fankids, and as I reached my mid-20s it got to me.
Finally, Marvel pissed me off. One of their writers, I mercifully forgot who, essentially pulled a Shatner and berated some fans for asking questions (and not really stupid or picky ones either) about a storyline he’d clearly half-forgotten and pretty much told us all to get a life. My friends and I laughed it off but it bugged me. Later that summer, there was some sort of Annual I picked up that had a picture on the back called “The You Universe”. It showed an overweight, overaged, long-haired, nerdish guy staring at a TV screen rerun of LOST IN SPACE or something in a dirty basement filled with comic memorabilia on the walls and tons of the long white boxes filled with comics. Like the ones I had.
Something in me snapped and I just stopped reading or collecting. Only comic I’ve picked up in 20 years or so are Season 8 BUFFY because, Buffy.
Similar thoughts and experience here.
In the household I grew up comics were looked down and were on “don’t bring in the house” list. I tried many but none were really holding up other than something to kill time. Until I started reading Italian made “Alan Ford” which, interestingly enough was only regionally popular and I never met anyone in North America who ever read it. It used to be weekly in 80-ies and the story is about a bumbling group of losers fighting villains and solving various cases with flower shop as a storefront in New York. The portrayal of life in America is unbelievably credible even though from a vantage point of a socialist cynic in Italy who actually never visited US. For example, there is a villain whose characteristic is a slight twist on Robin Hood story - this guy name is Superhick, his secret weapon is his alcoholic breath and he robs the poor and gives to the rich. I mean if that’s not an eternal villain I don’t know what is 
Are you all referring to superhero-based comic books? I have a real disconnect with that genre.
For me, I used to read comic books when I was a kid. Usually during the weekends, and usually while eating breakfast. Most of the comic books I read were self-contained. They didn’t need to be purchased every month to understand what was going on, but rather there would be 2-3 short stories in the comic book that would begin and end within that one book. Archie, Richie Rich, Little Lulu, to name a few.
As for why I don’t read them now, I think it’s because as others have mentioned. I grew up and my taste in reading material changed. I can’t remember the last time I actually sat down to read a comic book, or for that matter, seen one for sale. I’m sure they’ve been in stores I frequent, but I don’t see them. They just blend in to the noise of the store. I’ll have to see if I can find a comic book stand somewhere. Once I find one, I’ll see if there is something that is not a superhero cartoon ( bat,spider,whatever-man, fantastic 4 type stuff).
That’s not the same thing. I’d blame contempt for chick flicks on the subject matter, not the gender of the protagonist(s).
All these reasons.
And I’ll add the whole continuity problem. Comic book publishers should just give up on the idea of continuity and let each story stand on its own and let each writer use whatever version of a backstory he or she finds appropriate for the story at hand. The whole idea of constantly retroactively changing continuity is exhausting.
I have never read them and can’t get into picture book reading. It seems boring to me.
By and large, comics are still perceived as fit only for kids or semi-literate adults. That limits not only their readership, but also the number of intelligent writers who go into the field. There are exceptions, of course, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison being the first two that come to mind, but that’s just what they are - exceptions.
With so few comics writers producing material an intelligent, adult reader can hope to enjoy, what’s left appeals only to aging fanboys who want their continuity porn (perhaps with a little “sophisicated” sex and violence on the side) and solipsistic adolescents happy to tolerate the indie sector’s craft-free navel-gazing. Hence, the perception of comics as essentially a moronic medium is re-inforced, and the snake eats its own tail.
Having said that, I still love the medium of comics, and continue to buy work by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Pete Milligan, Joe Sacco, Robert Crumb, Seth, Jamie Hernadez, Dave Sim and a tiny handful of others. They represent a very small part of the comics industry as a whole, though, and it’s the fact that there’s so little work of that high calibre around which explains why I now buy far, far fewer comics than I used to.
This is mostly a me-too reply, but I have little else to do: so here it is! (FREE: Punctuation abuse in every paragraph!)
I like comics as an art form and a story-telling medium. I loved Watchmen and Sandman. And, for a while, I was buying the Buffy Season 8 and Angel After the Fall stuff every month (because Buffy! Joss! Etc!). But eventually my budget shrank and I had to make some hard choices. I spend maybe 10-15 minutes reading a comic book. At $3 for an issue, that comes out from $17 - $12 an hour for entertainment. That’s insane.
I did some back-of-the-envelope estimating and I figure that buying a novel gives me entertainment for about $1.25/hr. (And that becomes free if I take a trip to the library!)
I can buy a Bioware RPG for $60 and play it for about 80 hours. That’s $0.75/hr of entertainment.
And my $10/mo Netflix subscription can asymptotically approach $0/hr of entertainment depending on how much TV we watch in a month (we tend to watch too much Netflix).
For $12/hr, comic books would need to do something like supply a happy ending to even begin to be worth it while my resources are limited. So they were easily the first things to go when we started making budget decisions. (Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick up the Buffy collections one day when I’m more flush so I can finish the story. But it’s not a huge priority for me.)
Back when I was buying them, though, I thought about trying to get into the traditional stuff like Superman or Spider-Man: but I had no idea what to buy or when or in what order to read them and I couldn’t even begin to parse the backstory enough to think that I’d have any chance of knowing what was going on. So I never did buy any of those.
So, for me, it’s a combination of the huge $/hr discrepancy between comics and the other ways I can spend my leisure time combined with not really knowing what to buy outside of the Whedonverse: and comics are so expensive that just trying a few out quickly turns into a major investment.
I’m not sure that either of those could be fixed, though. Clearly, the amount of time, skill, and expertise that goes into making a comic book is expensive: I imagine that an artist can spend a long time working on a book that I’ll spend 10 minutes reading. And that doesn’t even begin to get into the work that the writers and editors and proofreaders and printers and marketers and everyone else has to do. Those folks need to get paid, and (as long as the product is niche and considered too nerdy or juvenile) the margins will need to be high to make up for relatively low sales volume.
And I don’t know how publishers would even begin to change the perception of comics with the masses. At the very least, they’d need to lower prices to make them more accessible. But that’s a big chicken-and-egg problem that free comic book day doesn’t seem to be helping a ton with.
And as long as comics are considered a geeky niche, it makes sense for the publishers to cater to their audience: so you get the massive multi-issue, multi-character (and sometimes multi-publisher) story arcs. I’m a geek and I like keeping track of that kind of thing (as long as I’m there from the beginning and don’t have to piece it together after the fact). So I can’t blame the publishers for keeping on that path.
But as long as those problems (not to mention my own budget problems) exist, I’ll content myself with the occasional summer blockbuster superhero movie.
Which I’ll watch on Netflix.
I enjoy graphic novels and underground comics, but not to an obsessive level. From what I’ve seen, it seems like people that are into comics are really, really, really into comics. You either have walls completely lined with bookshelves bearing nothing but anime, hundreds of archival acid-free bankers boxes filled with vacuum-sealed plastic bags of superhero comics, or nothing; there is no middle ground. If I tell someone I like Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb and Adrian Tomine, they seem to picture the same thing, too, not someone with just 10 or 15 graphic novels in the bookcase.
Same thing with jam band fans, too. Either someone is obsessive about Phish, The Grateful Dead and Widespread Panic to an unhealthy level, or they just don’t care.
But are those people complaining about the length of comic book stories necessarily the same people that watch Lost?
I never had a regular TV schedule where I would remember to sit in front of the TV at a certain time each week to see the continuation of a show. I might do it for a short miniseries that would interest me, but I could never get the energy to do it for a multi-season series. So I didn’t follow shoes like Lost or Battlestar Galactica (plus Battlestar Galacatica is on a cable channel I don’t get anyway.)
One of the problems I have with comic books are also mirrored in those TV shows you mention. This is a problem with US TV series vs. European TV series, in my experience. If someone comes up with an idea for a TV series on the BBC, they come up with a story arc, film it, and show it to the public, in a finite number of episodes, let’s say 6 or 7.
In the US, someone comes up with an idea for a TV series, might have a continuing story arc in mind, and presents it to a network. But then, the thought process is: if the show is popular, take your story arc, and extend it as much as possible; at the point it becomes unpopular, you’ll need to abbreviate your planned ending and come up with a half-assed resolution as soon as possible, or else the story stops half-way with no resolution.
Something similar happens with comic books. If I come up with a character that’s popular, like Superman, it doesn’t matter if I have a good story to tell anymore. It’s Superman so he will keep on being published ad infinitum. Of course writers get bored out of their skulls since everything has been done before, and start chopping and changing the character and his past history until it makes no sense any more.
When Hergé, creator of Tintin, one of the most popular European comic strips, died, that was the end of Tintin.
When Uderzo, the second half of the duo that created Astérix, died, the series was supposed to stop, and it created quite a bit of discussion when the company that owns 60% of the rights decided to continue the series. Uderzo’s daughter is fighting the decision to continue.