New Comic Day Blues

I'll lay out my current problem with comics with the following two examples.

In the first, a friend very well-intentionally purchased for me a stack of new comics. I looked through the stack with those sort of unfocused Matt Groening eyes, pulled out the Amazing Spider-Mans because I was following that particular arc, and said I really couldn't read the rest. I didn't say this to be ungrateful, but because I didn't want this person to waste money like this again. I had zero interest in reading those floppies.

"You can use them as research."

"Denny O'Neil told me years ago that I read too many comics already, and that I needed to read books. Do you think Warren Ellis goes into the comic store and purchases these sorts of titles as either research or entertainment?"

"He might."

"It's just that...I would have preferred you use the money to buy me a book like Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Or that new Drawn & Quarterly graphic novel."

I'm a wretch, right? I should have just read the comics and shut up. But then there would have been more the next week. And the unread stack grows and grows, making me feel guilty and out-of-touch. And some books are fairly entertaining, and some books are torture.

Now here's another example. I was going through my collection and getting rid of some titles & volumes. As I was sorting, three comic-related books caught my attention and fairly begged me to stop and read-re-read: Omaha The Cat Dancer, Bloom County, and Kyle Baker's Cowboy Wally. All three immediately grabbed my interest and forced me to stop my work and start reading. Contrast this to the tepid reception I gave the New Comic Day stack.

To be fair, I had that same instant-interest reaction to the TPB of Jack Kirby's The Eternals, for which I also dropped everything to read in the store.

But this is the problem. To be clear, this is to an extent a personal dilemma reflecting my own developing tastes. But I think some of it might be more universal.

One more example. I received World Of Warcraft: Something Or Otherland in the mail to review. I didn't even know what to do with it. You know that scene in "Airplane" where Robert Hayes says he has a drinking problem, and then proceeds to inncorrectly drink the water from the cup? That was me, only with reading instead of drinking. My eyeballs and brain could not stay focused on this comic. I couldn't even say if it was a good or bad book. It was something so out of my realm of either interest or expertise, that in the end all I could do was write that the art looked okay and that I guessed fans of W.O.W. would find it of interest.

Am I out of touch, am I too old? I read Hope Larson's Chiggers and found it a great book for teens. But then I've read other stuff for teens and I've been like: bleh.

A lot of it boils down to following tried-and-true characters and showing the "love" by purchasing the issues every month. But how long can you do that if the books are not delivering?

There are too many reprints, too many indie options, too little money, too little time. How much am I going to learn about writing comics by reading titles that are mediocre themselves? Isn't that like in the 1990s when artists would break into the biz by studying the work of Rob Liefeld?Shouldn't I instead be reading the best the medium has to offer? And then go and watch the best movies, and expand my scope and read a breadth of non-fiction and fiction books?

And I've asked this before: is it fair for me to review books that are crappy? Or books that are obviously not written for me? Or should I take a page from "Spinal Tap" and just write one sentence reviews: "shit sandwich."

And yeah, some of the comics which I think are the worst get great sales numbers. And according to the polls, we just might be voting in a presidental candidate that might bring us at least four more years of exactly the sort of administration that gutted this country for the last eight. Majority rules?

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this New Comic Day.