Previously in Confessions of a Comics Reader, I revealed that I followed last summer's triumphant escape from a lifelong comic book habit with a recent relapse, purchasing single issues for the first time in over a year. These single issues are fairly unique, appearing in a format that's unlikely to be collected in a way that's as fine and affordable of a showcase as the twelve broadsheet issues coming out weekly. For that reason, it feels a little less like a betrayal of my prior pledge--I haven't gone back to buying comic books, exactly--but it has still revived the gladly abandoned practice of finding time to get to the comic shop on a weekly basis.

I have been faithful to Wednesday Comics. I purchased the tenth issue today and will be returning to procure the final two over the course of the next couple of weeks. Through all these visits, I've only made one other purchase, the first issue of the current Detective Comics run by Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III. The art in it is beautiful and innovative, and clearly is going to be better served in an eventual collected format, freed for the off-putting interruptions of loud, gruesomely ugly ads for video games and other nonsense. Otherwise, I've collectively spent no more than a total of five minutes examining the other periodicals in the shop across all these weeks.

I have, however, gotten to know the proprietor somewhat, driven mostly by his reasonable interest in generating awareness for the store among the potential customers paying tuition at my current place of employment. To that end, he generously donated a box of comics to be placed in the on-campus coffee shop for students to peruse. Naturally, I couldn't resist poking through there myself.

There's a nice array of comics in the box: licensed adventures, Vertigo stalwarts, oddball hits, and a hearty offering of standard superhero comics from the Big Two. I read through a lot of them, discovering that Amanda Conner's marvelously expressive art goes a long way towards making Power Girl a fun title and that Brian Bendis's New Avengers is an abrasive, unreadable mess. I found that Brian Wood's Northlanders is sharp but uninvolving, and that Marvel can revisit one of one their more rewarding endeavors from the past twenty years with results that are diminished, but not damnably so.

I also found that the thrill remains gone. Even the best of this material didn't make me feel compelled to rush out and get more, to rededicate myself to collecting new issues, consuming these ongoing, endless sagas one issue at a time. The glossy testimonies to wonderment have left me behind. Perhaps I've outgrown them. Perhaps they've largely lost their charm, their energy, their verve. Maybe it's a little of both. The creativity on display in Wednesday Comics is one thing, the dull trudge of monthly comics largely crafted with the eventual collections in mind is quite another.

So, despite my proclamations, I returned to the colorful dazzle of the comic shop. Unwittingly, that comic shop provided the means for me to determine that once the unique title that lured me there completes its run, I can retreat again without regret.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

Last summer I regaled the online community with my sad tale of a childhood habit transformed into a lifelong obsession. Entitled Confessions of a Comics Reader, I detailed the multitude of times since my youthful consumption of paneled wonders in the nineteen-seventies that I tried to give up on comics books altogether. There were many nice, clean potential endpoints for the shameful collecting that came and went, always resulting with me still making regular treks to some sort of emporium of superheroes and art comix to purchase the most recent stapled servings of sequential art storytelling. With the publication of Giant Size Astonishing X-Men #1, Joss Whedon's final issue chronicling the exploits of Marvel's band of merry mutants, I was finally able to call it quits. Or so I thought.

This relapse was immediate and it wasn't complete. I didn't establish pull lists under assumed names and start hiding comics around the house so I could I could surreptitiously read them. I didn't even go into a comic shop for over a year, only venturing into one primarily out of a mix of curiosity and nostalgia when I traveled to Madison. Thanks to a tip from a soul_shear, I realized that my old favored shop resided at a new location (I previously thought they had closed down as a brick-and-mortar store), and I decided to check it out. I didn't spend a nickel in there. I was impressed with the layout and the general professional feel of the store, but the walls of current comics added up to an eyesore. As opposed to the bold pop art masterworks of my youth, these covers were aggressive smears of indistinguishable dark colors. It provoked the worst sort of sensory overload, sending me out with no regrets about purchases left unmade.

While I stopped buying comic books, I never stopped paying attention to them. There have been temptations aplenty, but nothing that compelled my to fish money out of my pocket to purchase a single issue. As I always knew and acknowledged I would, I purchased key trade paperback collections and patronized my local library for volumes both highly refined and chewily mass appeal. Weekly visits remained unnecessary and unappealing. Then there came Wednesday Comics, the latest brainchild of DC Comics Editorial Art Director Mark Chiarello, who earned my everlasting attention with the spectacular series Solo. Printed to resemble a the comics section of a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, Wednesday Comics was not likely to translate effectively to any other form. Waiting for a collection wasn't a palatable option. Given the unique demands of reworking the material, it may not even be feasible. To read this, to experience this, required weekly trips to a comics shop.

The images I saw from the publication were simply too alluring. As the photo above indicates, I caved. I found a place in town more agreeable that the comic shops I'd visited here previously and began making weekly purchases, sticking to Wednesday Comics with one other irresistable dalliance with a monthly publication. As I type, there are three issues remaining, and I fully expect that my comic celibacy will return once that final edition has been procured. Because, as much as I enjoy Wednesday Comics this tumble off the wagon has provided fresh evidence that I've made the correct choice.

Explaining that requires a little more detail, but no epic comic book adventure is truly complete without at least one tantalizing "To Be Continued..." so here it is now. Be here this weekend for the senses-shattering conclusion that we had to call "The Fate of the Four-Colors!"

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

Confessions of a Comics Reader, part five,

or

LO, THERE SHALL BE AN ENDING!

That is the last new comic book I will ever buy.

As noted is our previous gripping installment, we moved to Asheville, North Carolina with a couple standing commitments. Y the Last Man was still a few issues from its planned conclusion and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men was dragging its feet towards its "Giant Size" end. During the eleven months we've been here, I've set foot into local comic shops no more than two or three times to collect stray remaining issues, getting a couple more of them via mail order. I've only bought issues of those two series (okay, and maybe a Hellboy comic or two for firthofforth). No other impulse buys, nothing to try out, no series at a "perfect jumping on point." I finished the two remaining series to which I felt some commitment and that was it. There's no regret, no pang of nostalgic longing. There's just relief. I'm finally done with this.

Which isn't to say that I'm abandoning the form altogether. I still believe in the value of those little boxes with pictures as a means to storytelling, both for high art and genre merry-go-rounds. Nor have I lost my fondness for silly superhero stories. I simply no longer feel compelled, or even much interested, in reading these ongoing stories in monthly installments on printed, folded and stapled paper.

What finally brought me to this point after some two decades of pledged cessation and rapidly revoked pledges? Expressing my dismay with the current state of the comics field is probably its own five-part series of lengthy posts. I've grown weary of supporting a publishing industry that seems determined to implode by concentrating on increasingly insular storylines and inane fleeting gimmicks intended to just leech money from the aging fanbase that buys every "event comic" with a undiscerning servitude. I'm continually frustrated by the truncated feeling of reading individual issues that are clearly constructed with the inevitable trade paperback collection of a multi-issue storyline in mind. It's even that I've found Marvel's recent batch of product that can be interpreted as demeaning towards women (and even downright hateful) to be so mortifying and distasteful, less because of the product itself and more because of the incredulous defensiveness of the collective response to any criticism of the subtext of this material. That response betrays an underlying contempt towards the readers that dare to question what they read. As someone who believes that embedded messages, intentional or otherwise, should be examined, and equally believes in taking a discerning view of any media I consume, this approach on the part of the powers-that-be makes me feel unwelcome.

Still, I know better than to think I'll abandon my four-color pastime entirely. I continue to buy trade paperbacks on occasion, prowl relentlessly through my favored comic-based nooks on the Interweb, and accumulate old issues of the Lee-Kirby run on Fantastic Four and the Claremont-Byrne run on X-Men by gradually trading in the rest of my collection to that Texas comic shop that helped me build it in the first place. I will continue to covet those Jack Kirby Omnibus volumes the way a gearhead longs to get behind the wheel of a Ferrari F40. I've spent thirty years weaving these costumed adventures into my psyche. I can't just throw this part of me into a metal trash can and walk away.

It remains significant to me that weekly ship lists and new releases walls will no longer be part of my personal planning. I don't require a regular comic shop, a source for my habit. The obsessive need to be complete, the regular purchases, so many elements of this lifelong hobby are at a welcome end.

Excelsior!

Confessions of a Comics Reader, part four.

Despite my prior pledge, I did not stop buying comics when Cerebus ended. By that time, I had started reading another series with a definitive ending issue determined and announced, Y The Last Man. In December 2002, we were living in Orlando, Florida. One of the local geek emporiums had an annual, unlimited two-for-one sale around the end of the year. Besides loading up on coveted trade paperbacks and board games, I took the sale as an opportunity to try out a couple series I had heard good things about. And just look at that big, bold "New Storyline" promise right there on the cover. Clearly, this was the time to sample Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's series about the last male on earth.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When last I left this titanic tale of periodical procurement, I had just moved to Madison with a comfortably distant end date for my lingering childhood habit. It was easier for me to get my glossy, colorful pamphlets than ever with a few fine options across the city, including State Street's now gone Pic-A-Book, with its basement comic shop (staffed for at least a while by one of the family members that operated my first shop in Stevens Point) and the west side's slick, professional Westfield Comics (also, it seems, now gone as a storefront, though their long-standing mail order business clearly remains operational). I would even occasionally venture into the musty, beloved Capital City Comics, which was a little mecca of sorts when I was a kid. The shops were bigger and therefore more adventurous, allowing me to venture even further afield from the two-fisted superheroic adventures, though I still had a weakness for certain creators.

Eventually we landed in Orlando--some six months after visiting there for a wedding and commenting that this was the sort of place we'd never want to live in--a major move that could have been the exact breaking off point I needed without that pesky Cerebus pledge. Thing was, I wasn't even enjoying Cerebus any longer. Creator Dave Sim, who was always somewhat controversial in his views, had gone completely off the deep end, embracing religion and letting his long-festering hatred of women blossom completely into a virulent, self-satisfied misogyny. Not much of this actually seeped into the storytelling he was engaged in, but the vividness and the energy of his creation rapidly leaked away at this point. My collector mentality override this developing aversion to the title. I had decided to see it through to the end and that's just what I was going to do. It helped that I was equally dedicated to finishing an additional, far more consistently well-crafted series that hadn't yet reached its final issue. In Mickeyville, there were plenty of shops to choose from: the aforementioned warehouse of nerdiosity, Sci Fi City; the polished Coliseum of Comics, with its handy mall location (I mentioned this to caker_66 once and he noted how effectively a comic shop located in a mall would have solved all the comic-related problems of his youth); and, of course, the place that takes great pains to assure its lonely patrons that super-hot chicks like comics, too.

It was easier to perpetuate the habit once I dragged firthofforth into this miasma of collecting. She developed her own favorite creators who inspired the devotion of thoroughness. If I was going to the comic shop to get something for her, then I may as well pick up a bunch of Batman comics for me while I'm there. This arrangement worked handily for some time.

Then another major shift in geography occurred and we found ourselves in Asheville, North Carolina. Suddenly, the opportunity to pick up new books changed dramatically. The only conveniently located shop I found had an store aesthetic so sloppy that it looked like it was formed by picking up the whole place and giving it a good shake. It didn't help salve my sustained embarrassment over my chosen preoccupation that the store bore a name I found unbearably geeky. Cerebus had long since ended. There were a couple other titles being actively collected, each a few issues away from their predetermined ending issues. Could this finally be the end?

Next Issue: Face Front, True Believers! Our stirring saga reaches a fearsomely fantastic finale! This one has it all!

Confessions of a Comics Reader, part three.

When last we left this drama, I was departing for college, intending (or perhaps hoping) to set aside the comic book habit once and for all. It had served me well and filled my time for years, but the serious-minded hunkering down of adulthood was meant to accompany the step up to the costly concentration of higher education, wasn't it? Besides, the comics industry had changed considerably in years since I plucked individual issues of Fantastic Four and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man off the lowest shelf of the magazine rack at the local grocery store. Comics were largely absent from supermarkets, drugstores, gas stations, the sort of places where they once shimmered enticingly for impressionable eyes, luring in new readers. Instead, you needed to find a specialty shop, a place that basically only sold comic books, usually one wall covered with the most recent releases and the rest of the space taken up by pricey, desirable back issues. I was going to college in a fairly isolated, smallish city. There was no guarantee I'd find such an establishment.

Truth is, I wasn't there for long before I found a comics shop, located conveniently, problematically right around the corner from my new bank. By necessity, I scaled back my purchases significantly. My only source of income, besides the very occasional generosity of distant relatives, was a modest work-study job with the university, serving as a projectionist for the film classes in the communications department ("projectionist" at this place and time largely meant pressing play on a VCR and then sitting out in the hallway with my homework, although I faced the frustration of working with the rickety 16mm projector a couple of times thanks to Dr. Midkiff DeBauche's Soviet films course). I had little money and couldn't indulge in the sort of stacks I once enjoyed. This caused me to largely forgo the titles I used to collect obsessively in favor of exploratory purchases of comics I was curious about, but had never actually seen. Besides the comics themselves, I was an insatiable reader of magazines, newspapers and any other stray article I could find relating to comics, so I had a working knowledge of almost everything going on in the field even if I didn't have the nerve to order any of that stuff sight unseen from the various mail order outlets.

So, one day I walked into the comic shop and walked out with this:



I was familiar with the barbarian aardvark from a handful of reviews or other accolades in the sort of "Bang! Pow! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" articles that sprouted like Sumerian crabgrass back then. I had even read a couple of atypical stories that were published in Marvel's Heavy Metal wanna-be Epic Illustrated. But I had never seen an issue until that day. I'm not sure why it grabbed me--writer/artist Dave Sim's storytelling style was not well-suited to single issue reading by this point--but it did. In short order, I bought a few recent back issues, which only served to prove that, unlike my initial foray into superhero comics, I wasn't going to be able to get into this extended tale in a piecemeal fashion. Sim was creating a 300-issue "novel," divided into hefty individual stories running for anywhere from 25 to 50 issues. Luckily (or not, depending on the perspective) the next new issue to hit the stands began a new storyline, one that was especially well-suited to a reader starting fresh: the understated, beautifully evocative "Jaka's Story."

I was newly committed to regular trips to the comic shop, seeking out the next installment of Cerebus. And since I was there, I may as well pick up other stuff, too. It always felt a little awkward to only get one thing. Many other patrons were walking up the counter with piles as tall as a couple Chicago phonebooks, after all. Just getting one thing made you look like an interloper instead of a proper denizen of the comic geek nation. Eventually, I befriended others who helped perpetuate the habit. soul_shear set me up with a better comic shop, the old Galaxy Hobby, and caker_66 was my Cerebus cohort, engaging in ludicrously literary late-night conversations about the fiery grey aardvark and introducing me to other series from the artier part of the comic universe. He'll tell you it was me that introduced him to the comic book about the fucking cats. That's true.

After college, I stayed in Stevens Point for another year-and-a-half, comfortable in my routines. Eventually, though, the time came to move on. I got a job in commercial radio and moved back to my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. This was another major mile marker in my life's journey and a new opportunity to make a break with the comic book habit, this remnant of my youth. Except that I had mentally committed to Cerebus and it was still years away from its planned ending with issue number 300. Like an addict always pledging a change in one more day, I had my new endpoint. I would stop reading comics once Cerebus reached its conclusion.

You probably already have a sense of how well that plan worked out.

Continuing the sad tale we had to call Confessions of a Comic Reader...



That was the comic that really got me in trouble. I was in Dick's Supermarket in McFarland, Wisconsin, trying to figure out which glossy title would be my payment for being a relatively well-behaved shopping companion (particular for a typically troublesome ten-year-old). As noted previously, I usually gravitated towards "funny animal" comics, which is a bit of a misnomer since I was usually reading about an obscenely wealthy, fair-haired boy. This day, though, I wanted something different, something more exciting, something more grown-up. I let my eyes linger to the superhero side of the comic rack and that cover grabbed me for some reason. Maybe it was the fact that the child in peril looked about my age, maybe it was vague memories of the cartoon series making that foursome fearfully responding more approachable.

I got the comic, took it home and read it. I was immediately, horribly hooked. Soon, I was anxiously demanding return trips to get more titles, including anything I could find with my immediate new favorites, the Fantastic Four. The kiddie comics of my youth were now completely disregarded as I relentlessly went after anything with a "Marvel Comics Group" banner across the top. I read and re-read those issues (anything I still have from that time is practically in tatters now).

While the comedic comics I previously read were basically interchangeable, these Marvel superhero comics were part of major ongoing storylines. Everything intersected to such a degree that explanatory captions were often required--



--to specifically indicate just where (or, more precisely, when) in the chronology a particular titanic tale fit. If you missed issue number 23 of Richie Rich Zillionz, issue number 24 was still going to be easily understandable. Not so with Marvel Two-in-One or Moon Knight. Clearly the haphazard method of acquiring them at local businesses more concerned with selling milk, gum or gasoline was not going to be sufficient. Why, I never even saw the issue of Daredevil guest-starring Power Man and Iron Fist! I convinced the benefactors of my addiction to get me subscriptions to my favored titles. They arrived monthly, folded into the mailbox and wrapped in brown paper like pornography.

Eventually, the sorry condition of those individually mailed comics made me seek out subscription services from major comics retailers that would spend a month collecting your chosen issues to bundle them up into a small brick the approximate size and shape of a car muffler and ship them off to you. Embarrassingly enough, there may have been no happy moments during my teen years than those when I actually heard the package thump onto the doorstep.

I had picked an especially opportune time to wander into this caped crowd. It was something of a high-water mark, with Frank Miller's Daredevil run, John Byrne's extended revitalization of Fantastic Four and Walt Simonson's reinvention of Thor. And then, just as I was getting mature enough to need something a little more challenging, along came Alan Moore to blow my mind.

Still, college was looking, another step forward towards adulthood. The time was right to leave this habit behind. I canceled the subscriptions service and gifted a chunk of my collection to my younger brother (being careful to stash the sizable number of issue I wanted to keep someplace where he wouldn't confuse them with the crummier ones I was willing to part with). I made the move to Stevens Point (go Pointers!) fully intending to be done with comic books.

Of course, it wasn't that easy...

This week's posts will be unbearably geeky. Feel free to gloss right past them, especially if you're one of the people who rolls your eyes (or, as I imagine studiesinsecret doing, simply shake her head in resigned disappointment) every time I fill a day with a Batman cover.

And so, we begin Confessions of a Comic Reader...

I was a precocious reader. I've been told I was racing through books while I was still a toddler. It was remarkable enough, that my mother's father, a brigadier general (and, I just discovered, one of the inaugural inductees into the Wisconsin Air National Guard Hall of Fame, wherever that is) and not someone typical prone to nurturing tendencies, sought out a child psychologist he knew to ask about the best methods for supporting this advanced behavior. That person recommended he buy me some comic books (oh, how times had changed). As my mother tells it, he came into the house one day and placed a stack of comics into my lap. I looked up at him, initially perplexed, and then started to flip through the colorful pages. As opposed to her expectations about how someone whose age could still easily be calculated in months would treat such material, she said I was meticulously careful with each one. So, anyway, that means I can blame him.

Through my youngest years, I was an insatiable fiend for comic books. While I was a relentless reader, I was also a highly impatient reader, always longing for the ending of a story so I could move on to the next one. The dense brevity of comics suited me. There were a few stray superhero comics around our various homes--this was the 1970's, when certain superhero comics were briefly enjoying a weirdly hip cultural cachet and could be found among the possessions of otherwise self-respecting citizens--but I mostly steered clear of them, in large part because some of the covers scared the hell out of me. Instead I was a maven for silly Dennis the Menace collections and the full array of Harvey Comics titles. Comics are widely derided as kids' stuff, but I was really slumming with the most juvenile material longer than I should, especially given that I had the capability to read far more complex material.

Back then, finding comics was easy but hunting down specific comics was a challenge. There weren't really prevalent specialty stores or mail order services. Instead, I got mine off of the spinner rack at the Copp's Department Store or from the bottom row of the magazines display at any of the supermarkets or convenience stores I got dragged into. I needed to check anywhere, because every store had slightly different inventory and I never knew when I might discover something I needed. And, yes, needed is the appropriate phrasing.

I was eight-years-old and biding my time over by the magazine shelves at the old Stop and Go on Monona Drive in Madison, perusing as whatever unfortunate adult had taken me there tried to complete their purchase (but was probably waiting for the inevitable moment when I'd come charging into view clutching a wad of vividly colored paper, my eyes pleading to add just this one thing to the transaction) when I spotted this--



Besides the previously reported predilections, I was a devotee of pinball, the result of an overabundance of childhood years spent in bars, where adults would gladly part with handfuls of quarters to get a few more minutes of peace from the diminutive jabberjaw they were forced to bring along. So this cover was irresistible. Inside the pinball machine? Glory, hallelujah--I needed to read the story that inspired that image. For whatever reason, I immediately realized that they were in a gigantic pinball machine instead of the victims of some sort of insidious shrinking (and by that time I well knew how insidiously shrinking technology could be employed), which only made it more tantalizing. The necessary forty cents was sought and attained and the issue was mine.

The story ended on a cliffhanger, so I similarly needed to get the next issue. Otherwise I'd never know if Colussus's cohorts managed to free him from the brainwashing that had turned him into the villainous Proletarian. I was, as I recall, a pest, urging for return trips to that fairly out-of-the-way convenience store because I was certain it was the most likely place to find what I sought. I got it, read it and was apparently satisfied enough with the outcome that I returned to the comparatively benign worlds of cheery satanic cherubs and multi-species competition, venturing back the Marvel universe only when there were puzzles involved. But an itch had clearly started to develop. Before long, I'd need to do some serious scratching.

(Note to anyone out there as geeky as me: I'm aware that Kitty Pryde was not yet a part of the X-Men at the time of the issue pictured above, making the title of this post misleading. But how often do you get the opportunity to quote lyrics that namecheck two relatively obscure members of Marvel's merry mutants? On the other hand, I'm glad to note that caker_66's favorite X-man was indeed on the roster for this key issue.)