Used to read comic books a hundred years ago. I only liked Marvel, and followed them for quite a few years, until I was 14 or 15, and then…I don’t know why I stopped, really. It got too complicated, or I got bored with all those bulging muscles in spandex, or I simply found other things to do. Mom really DID throw out a big cardboard box full of my collection. But I enjoyed them immensely, I liked the X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and Thor. I still have a handful of old X-Men and FF’s, but the stories don’t hold up…On the other hand, I had the bittersweet experience a couple years ago shopping with my ancient mother at Target, we went past the men’s clothing section, and there folded up on a table were T-shirts with Marvel comics characters on them, and I could say (with absolute truth, no lie) - “look Mom, I’m almost an old lady now, and do you see those t-shirts? Characters from my old comic books? If you hadn’t thrown out my comic book collection, I might be a millionaire by now!”
Me, too. I’ll stop by a little hole-in-the-wall comic shop and grab a couple oldies out of the bargain bin, but I just can’t spend more than a couple of bucks on entertainment these days. Which rules out seeing movies in a theater, too 
But grab three torn Silver Age comics for a buck and find a comfy chair …ahh…
I’ve never gotten into comic books. I simply can’t stand the format. The pictures and dialogue jump around too much for my tastes and I can’t just blow through it like I can with a normal text novel. Not to mention that superheroes and the like just doesn’t interest me at all.
That being said, I do enjoy some newspaper cartoons- three panels and a punchline is very doable.
I finally stopped reading them at the end of 2008. Up to that point I was reading quite a few Marvel comics every month, although for the last year I had pretty much lost interest. Every humorous series got cancelled. Every good thing that happened to any character got revoked. Stories got darker and darker, apparently just for the sake of being dark, and there were too many “big events” that promised to “change the shape of the Marvel Universe forever!” I just finally reached my breaking point.
They also decided, somewhere around 2000, that continuity was unimportant, and the writers of long-running series no longer thought it necessary to know anything that had gone before, much less try and keep events or characterizations consistent. What’s the point of reading, if a few years down the line none of what you’re reading is going to even apply?
never been a comic reader
Too old today. Even as a kid I wouldn’t waste my allowance on something I could read & give away in 15 minutes.
My barber had a stack of old comics that kids read waiting for haircuts. Mostly young kid comics like Richie Rich or Archie.
I’ve only been a reader since the first X-Men movie (and I am in my mid-30s, I’m one of the few that got into them after childhood) but I am losing interest. I used to go to the comic shop weekly, now I go every month or so. I still have most of last month’s lying unread.
I don’t have the heart to tell the guy that runs the shop. I really like the guy, but I’m just not reading them anymore.
:eek:
I’m honestly surprised that you of all people could give them up. Think you can make it stick?
Me, I’m still a casual reader. But I always have been, so it’s never been much of a strain to keep up ( or not, as the case may be ). I went through a ~12-15 year period when I abandoned them entirely starting around the mid 1980’s, but discovering Peter Bagge’s Hate around the end of its run slowly sucked me back into the habit.
Every time I page through a comic I start fervently wishing for paragraphs, give me more text! Like WhyNot said, novelizations of comics would be awesome.
Plenty of people have done very good analyses of the failings of the industry and why it doesn’t appeal or doesn’t get new blood easily.
For myself, I never really got into them as a kid. I had like 1 Archie and 1 Hulk that ended up in my hands, but they didn’t really get my attention enough to bother hunting down more of anything. I enjoyed the Superman movie and watched Superfriends until I gave up Saturday morning cartoons, even watched the cheesy Batman TV show in reruns when I could, but never really got into comics. I was into books, and spent my money on Star Trek novels and other science fiction/fantasy.
Recently, some folks have shared a few items with me and I’ve given them a try. First was Buffy Season 8. I got the first half in a set, and read my way through them. While I generally enjoyed getting fresh Buffy, and after a bit could see things developing Whedonesque, the medium was trying. You know how a good Buffy episode would play out, have some episode story and a larger arc going on? Well, comics stuff that into 4 pages and it just feels rushed and empty, like a Buffy episode is 15 minutes to tell what used to run in 1 hour.
I tried out Watchmen on the rerelease, and am glad I got it in the graphic novel, not a weekly/monthly run of episode at a time. Each snippet of the story doesn’t really get going until you put a pile together and let it soak in. Zipping through 20 pages and then being done ruins the flow of getting into the process for me.
I was impressed by the tone change simply because it was novel to me, having my expectations set by The Superfriends cartoon and the Batman TV show.
Just read a copy of the new Batman and Robin by Frank Miller. Holy crap. So Batman is a psychopath, and apparently Miller hates most superheroes, because he blasts the fuck out of them. Superman is an idiot (who doesn’t know he can fly*), WonderWoman is a man-hating bitch (but still wears such a skimpy, exhibitionist outfit), Green Lantern has a ring that can make anything he an imagine and he’s limited to a giant fist, an eggbeater, etc**. Robin rips on Batman naming his vehicle the Batmobile. It feels like Miller is pissing all over pretty much every superhero.
Lack of story density per episode and episodic delivery are two big hurtles. Couple that with complex backstory/continuity/universe rules, cost, and crossovers, and it all becomes way too much for me to want to bother with it.
- That’s a historical artifact that Superman didn’t fly at first and it was later added to his powers, so Miller has decide it’s because Superman was too stupid to know he could fly. He generally plays up how Batman is brilliant and everybody else is apparently a moron.
** That’s Batman riffing on Green Lantern, and what Batman would do with the ring.
I collected comics from 1971 to 2008. My main interest was the superhero genre, and I collected quite a number of Marvel and DC titles. I have amassed a fairly large collection, about seventy long boxes.
I stopped because I decided I was spending too much. I really do enjoy the genre; I suppose if I made $1,000 extra a month, I would probably start collecting again.
Posted after only reading the first page of comments:
I have never been a comic book reader. In theory I would like comic books. I like a lot of the stories that have come out of them. I have read some graphic novels.
But I just simply cannot stand the format - pictures, with a few words. I am excessively verbal and really struggle with having to look at a picture for every sentence or two of text. I hate the different fonts for emphasis, and I hate not having paragraphs, or having to turn the page to try and find out what happens next, and finding it’s the end of the comic book.
Someone gave me the Adventures of Baron Munchausen comic books in a white elephant exchange, and while I enjoyed them, that was like 6 books! And there is no re-readability in comic books for me.
In short, I simply don’t enjoy the medium, at all. It’s rather like poetry. Of course there are a few poems I like, just as I am sure there are some comics I would like, but on the whole I’ve given it up as a bad job.
Mostly me too, but maybe the fact that they were $.12 when I was serious about them gives some indication of where I am coming from.
Too expensive - ten minutes every month, and $3 a pop. And you gotta read every one of them for eighteen months to get anything like a complete story. Not to mention all the crossovers.
And not every character has to be dark and tortured. I know, I know - Dark Knight was hugely influential. Add to that all the retconning, and you can’t depend on anything as a key to a character, because it all is going to change again once a new artist takes over. And people dying and coming back to life - it means that there is no resistance of the medium, and therefore no art.
I do still read comics, but I buy the compilations and then I can read a whole story at one sitting. Most of them are from the period when I was reading them first - *Legion of Super Heroes, Batman, Thor, Captain America. * And (just to show I am not a complete stick-in-the-mud) I am collecting the Sin City graphic novels, but that is only after loving the movie, which I saw first.
I think the basic problem is that they are milking the franchise beyond what it will bear.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve toyed with the idea of returning to comic books, but when I looked into Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, I found there were so many storylines going on simultaneously that I didn’t know where to start so I lost interest in the idea.
The only comic book I read is PS 238. I probably would enjoy something from Marvel or DC, but there’s such a huge mess of them that I’ven’t a clue where to start with them.
As a child and young adult I never got into comics. My first real encounter with them was recently when my beloved tv show, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” came out with season 8 in comic book form.
I wasn’t impressed.
Sure, the monsters were a lot more than people in furry suits and some of the characters (ie Buffy and Angel) could fly now, and Willow as super witch, but so what. The witty snappy dialogue was gone, being too many words to cram into a small box on a page. The many female characters were not drawn distinctly enough, so half the time I couldn’t tell Dawn from Willow from Kennedy. On TV they could use flashbacks, but in the comic they relied on the reader to remember an obscure occurance from 4 issues back, and frankly my memory isn’t that good.
Some of the mini-ark stories were good (Buffy v Faith v. the English chick who’d been chosen) were great, but the overal season story was just “meh.”
Been reading them since Jr. High in the early 90s and still reading them.
But I wanted to address Choppers post. They do make novelizations. i don’t think there are a lot of them though.
I own this particular one.
This is a big reason for me. It is rare for a comic to hit the sweet spot of both interesting art and writing. Those particular two had rather lazy and simple art, IMO, and would have been better off as straight traditional text novels.