All These Good Times Are Killing Us

The blogger and retailer Chris Butcher provides the most high-profile of a number of rumblings out there about the staggering number of quality publication being released every week in comics right now, which when combined with increasingly dire news about the US economy is making many people ask the question of whether or not something has to give. I would imagine in a lot of cases something has already given: certainly in mainstream comics and in manga we see evidence that there are limits to the depth and breadth of those particular markets -- people are no longer buying everything. One advantage that the smaller art comics market has over its bigger brethren is that its primary corporate entities are a) established, disciplined comics publishers that managed to survive when there was no money in what they did and aren't likely to go crazy now that there's a tiny little bit of money in it, b) major publishing houses that have the resources to adapt by, say, changing the size of advances or simply getting out.

That doesn't really help matters if you're a comics consumer whose eyes are bigger than your wallet. I'm an atypical consumer of comics in that I get a lot of stuff for review purposes. However, one thing that helped me when I was a broke grad student and an even broker recession-suffering twentysomething was to change my orientation towards comics. I stopped thinking New Comics Day and started thinking about building a library -- to have a comics collection I would never resent taking with me. The way I did this was roughly 1) figured out what I was spending, 2) quit going to the shop for six weeks, 3) started depositing a percentage of my weekly purchase amount -- whatever I wanted it reduced to -- into a fee-free checking account starting that first break week and making that a weekly habit (or doing so virtually in terms of my existing account; if a dedicated account or category sounds insane to you, you don't buy enough comics for buying comics to be a problem), 4) vowed to end the practice of double-dipping, which didn't always mean trades over comics but certainly meant one or the other, 5) when I started to buy again not buying anything the week it came out for six months, 6) never buying from the same place three times in a row. At least that's how I remember that transition this week; my memory's not great there. But the rough idea of it is solid.

Although if everyone were to do what I did it might mean the death of the Direct Market, I'm much happier now with the way I purchase comics than I was as a teen and as a young man. Waiting just a tiny bit of time before purchase makes me reconsider how much I really want something apart from the desire to consume it immediately, and allows me access to things like the first wave of Amazon.com used book sales of that item. Making myself buy from different locations helped improve the variety of my purchases -- when you're buying from Abebooks.com instead of Roger's Comics Hut you're more likely to buy an Abner Dean book as opposed to a third comic series starring a team of young runaways. Making a decision to buy something based on how much money you have in your comics account is a much less stressful process than deciding if you want to take extra money out of the same account that facilitates car repairs and the purchase of medicine. Moreover, once you restore some sanity week-in and week-out, and establish a habit of buying only the books you're really going to enjoy instead of buying a bunch of comics to have a comics-reading experience or some other, strange reason, you'll find that the occasional impulse buy of a big, expensive hardcover or picking up a random pile of comic books is a fun thing to do a few times a year.

If you're still overwhelmed by a desire to read certain books, try inter-library loans to facilitate freeing up cash for those comics that aren't available that way. I'm not certain most folks really need to own a copy of Terry Gilliam's Animations of Mortality, but it's a book just about any comics fan will enjoy reading. If you orient yourself to Wednesdays-only and can remember a time when you could buy everything you wanted that was out that day, it's bound to be frustrating to grapple with a present reality where you can't. If you orient yourself to 114 years of an art form it's obvious you'll never own it all; you can relax and take more pleasure in everything you can own. It's a fact of life that in comics as with all things wonderful in this world you're probably going to want more than you can afford. It doesn't have to get you down. Buy to read. Collect to re-read. And most of all: enjoy.
 
posted 8:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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