The short answer is that we are now several months removed from the last Big Event I felt compelled to purchase/collect obsessively and at this point I can’t really remember the last time I even went to the comic book shop. A couple weeks ago I bought a pair of trade paperback collections for my Little Bro as a birthday gift, but I picked those up at Barnes & Noble. And I’ve bought myself a graphic novel or compilation here and there, as well, like the volume of Fables I read on vacation at the beach, but I those might very well (and probably likely) have come from book stores or Amazon, not comic shops. So it would seem that if any part of the re-assessment process was answer the question, “Can I live without buying monthly 22-page comic books?” the answer would be a resounding “Apparently so.” I have, unintentionally and almost unawares, quit cold turkey.
But even if that is part of the figuring out to be done (and it probably, validly is) it’s not the whole essence of it. “Do I want to live without ever buying monthlies?” is another part of it, and that’s what I’m currently grappling with. On the one hand it makes more and more sense economically and logistically to just be patient, wait for comics I like to be collected as TPBs, and buy those (or not, if over the course of being patient word gets out that the series in question is a real crapfest). But on the other hand, I do still like the immediacy of reading a story when it comes out, and when everyone else is talking about it, kind of like how I enjoy seeing a movie in the theater when it’s new rather than on DVD when nobody else cares (although of course I never seem to make it to the movies much these days, either). But then again, these days “everyone else talking about it” mostly means faceless bloggers and commenters on the internet, since my friends who used to read comics as faithfully as I did have all moved away from the habit/hobby as well. But then yet again on the alternate back-up hand, how much was being a collector and a completist always something I did mostly for myself?
I probably won’t be figuring this out any time soon. What I know for sure is that I’m just now starting to get that itch to go back to the comic book shop. And the timing of that urge is terrible, because if I go to the shop I may feel the irresistible impulse to buy some big-ticket item, and on top of all the usual reasons why that would be non-ideal, I am currently a week and a half away from my birthday which is a generally acknowledged window of time during which it’s really, really bad form to buy yourself something you wouldn’t mind getting as a gift.
In the mean time I should probably start cleaning out my existing comic book collection in earnest. I suspect that letting go of comics I’ve had for years will give me a pretty good internal read on how badly I want to replace those with newer ones. You may also recall (again, though, probably not) that last time I mentioned pruning the old comics library I was held back by not having a scanner with which to take farewell shots of that which I would sell off or give away. But that excuse no longer holds. So.
I suspect I am going to end up taking the moderation-in-all-things approach I usually espouse, and I’ll mostly stick to big books of high-quality material supplemented with the occasional stand-alone comic just because. Some things spark my mind just so, and I need to get them in my hands with all due haste. For example, at the end of October comes “Avengers Vs. Pet Avengers” and you know what that means …
FROG THOR. (At the bottom, if you were distracted by dragons and dogs and whatnot.)
Yeah, he pretty much gets a lifetime pass.
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