Wednesday, September 28, 2016 • Morning Edition • "The CBR of comic book journalism."
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I'm Getting Pissed Off Again With Comics
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And I know that it's only a blanket term for dozens of genres, adding to my confusion. |
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I hear that. My issue is that the ones I want to check out I can't find collections for : "What's Michael" and "Blade of the Immortal" The two I did check out I enjoyed. "Battle Royale"-nuf has been said about this "Iron Wok Jan"-quirky book about a Chinese food prodigy who's a complete asshole. |
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The commercial releases are not all that great and it's still really in the realm of the fantranslations, just as with anime. With manga there are tons of genres to choose from. Personally, I walked away from manga long ago along with comics. Never got back to manga as with comics. But that could change. |
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Don't worry about it. Just read Neon Genesis Evangelion and Akira. |
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I've heard good things about Batman Black and White. |
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So more along the lines of what the X-Book crossovers have been doing for several years now? I could work with that. |
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I think the problem Cat is having is similar to my own. When I start reading a series, it's not because of a gimmick or an event. It's because I have tried the series out and found it good, or perhaps, because I generally like the character. Great example: New 52 Supergirl. I have a long history with Supergirl, going back to her guest appearances in the early 1980s LSH. Supergirl, at least the original, is my favorite comic-book character of all time, period. So of course I am going to want to read her book. I also like her cousin, though not as much, and when I came back I sampled Action, but Morrison's writing makes me want to kill kittens, and Superman, but it was all over the place in terms of writing until Lobdell came on, and his writing makes me want to kill kittens AND puppies. So I dropped those. But then right smack in the middle of the Supergirl series I get the "H'el on Earth" crossover. Now my problem with this crossover is that (1) it sucked by any objective measure, and (2) I could not "just ignore it" without ignoring Supergirl's series completely. And after the 4-issue crossover it wasn't over, because guess what, here we are on issue 23 (last month) and the fallout from that crossover (Supergirl's Kryptonite poisoning, etc) is still going on. How exactly am I supposed to ignore this? The only way is to stop reading Supergirl's comic altogether. That's not really a very attractive option when she's still my favorite character ever (well... the original is... not this new one so much). This is the problem with Crossovers. Here are the options you have with a story that hop-scotches from title to title: 1. Buy just your series, and accept being completely lost and confused for as many as 6 months because you're not reading all the other parts. 2. Buy all the other parts, even though you don't read those other books, thus wasting lots of money ad reading material by creative teams you may not even like, about characters you don't care for enough to collect. 3. Don't buy your series at all, thus missing as many as 6 installments of your favorite series so you don't have to deal with the crossover at all. I don't consider any of these to be attractive alternatives. Who wants to read only 1/3rd of a story? Who wants to have huge gaps in his or her collection? And who wants to spend money on a bunch of extra stuff for months at a time just because the comics companies are trying to force it on us? This is why the Big Two tick me off. I heard great things about Captain Marvel for instance, and I toyed with getting it, but before I could even consider really pulling the trigger I saw that it is already doing the event crossover thing. So now I'm going to have to get Infinity and inform myself on the "event" just to follow the Captain Marvel stuff? Instead, I 'just said no.' |
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If you don't want to read the crossover, then DON'T. Your favorite character had stories written before the crossover, she'll have stories written after it. Read those. Skip the crossover, save yourself time, money, and heartache, and move on. |
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Curiously, Blade of the Immortal was the only one I've read any of, and that was a middle volume, so I was kind of out to sea. Fun, though. |
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Marvel's recap page has been a godsend in this sense. You are literally told everything you need to know before the first panel. I personally love skipping an issue or two of a Marvel comic and seeing only one or two lines of text detailing something that happened in the issue I skipped. That just shows how easy it is to do without an issue here or there. |
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Hab |
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To you. Some of us like having unbroken numbered sequences. Just because unbroken numbered sequences don't matter to you doesn't mean that for some of us it is an important part of the collecting hobby. And even if we lose the "numbered sequence" argument, 4-6 months of "H'el on Earth" that I don't want to read means I can't read any new stories about Supergirl for near-on half a year. How is that going to be a positive experience for someone who wants to read new Supergirl stories? Yeah I guess I could go buy back-issues -- if I haven't read them, they're new to me. But as I have every single issue printed with Supergirl's name on it since 1982 (including even the Supergirl/Legions) that means I will have to reach way back in history to get some new stories, and thus (a) they will be far more expensive than a current issue, and (b) they are hard to find. And finally, even if you ignore the thing, a crossover still disrupts the overall narrative flow of the series. A great example of a series that had its flow interrupted so much by crossovers that it never, in 67 issues, achieved anything approaching a consistent narrative tone, is the previous Supergirl series. Nearly 50% of the issues in that series (~30 out of 67) were crossover issues. That series never settled down because of it. How does "so just ignore the crossovers" work in such a context? It means reading a story arc here, a story arc there, and ignoring huge chunks (at one point, the series spent 18 months straight doing crossovers with the other Superbooks). At what point does it cease to become, for all practical purposes, a series, rather than just a collection of disconnected story arcs with the same logo? And although story arcs by themselves may be OK, a good series with a strong narrative flow is greater than the sum of its parts. Great example: The Surtur Saga from Simonson's Thor (337-355). I would certainly never argue that anyone but me should want to "complete the series" or desire to sink his or her teeth into a long narrative flow for many months or even years, but that is what I like. And thus the whole 'event' mentality leaves me cold. And annoyed. |
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Buy the floppies. Saves time and worries over how well they are put together. |
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