If you were to start reading comics again after a nearly 25 year hiatus, where would you start? How would you span the knowledge gap, pick up on the continuity, fill in the back-story of the myriad of new characters or understand the revisions to the old ones? Would you buy only the old titles you remembered from your youth? Or would you take the shotgun approach and buy everything you could afford, anything with a cool cover or slick title, anything with Batman in it, or Spider-man, or the X-men? Would you expand your reach to books that didn’t include superheroes or to something completely different like Manga? Would you be amazed at the quality of the art and depth of the stories, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of titles, or saddened that there’s still so much junk out there? Would you become a collector again or simply a reader – or both? Would you stay committed to the hobby or would this be a short-lived attempt to recapture a bit of childhood? What would prompt you to even attempt this? We may never know what you would do in this situation. But I can tell you what I’ve done and sometimes even why I did it.
25 years is a long time. Especially if it’s the 25 years from 1979 to 2004. Comic books went through some major evolutionary changes in this span and while it often seems like I quit just when things started to get interesting, the trade-off is that I have a much richer tapestry to examine today. I’ve returned to find an industry with level of talent rivaling nearly any and yet continually squandering good will and missing opportunities; an industry that can be condescendingly overbearing within its self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, largely insular little world and at the same time be wildly insecure about its place in the larger worlds of entertainment and the creative arts.
Things are different now, to be sure. Oh, most of the old heroes are still around, fighting alongside some new ones and battling against a similar mixture of old and new, but the stories themselves are better told and better drawn; the comic book store operators are now savvy retailers, replacing the misfits selling their massive collections from hole-in-the-wall outposts far off the main drag; and while the form-factor of the books is the same, the quality is light years improved - and the cost of the books? Ah, the costs...The two big publishers are still the Big Two publishers but there is so much more in the slipstream than there was before.
And perhaps the biggest change of all? Mass Media. Characters the general public hadn’t the slightest clue about -- or interest in -- two decades ago are now plastered on billboards, magazine covers, lunchboxes, board games, dairy products and children’s underwear. As kids, my brother and I would take turns naming actors or actresses we thought best suited to play various super heroes on the big screen – all the while admitting that Hollywood could never give us an honest representation of our icons and that we’d prefer they didn’t even try if it meant seeing a two-bit actor in a bad costume cannabalizing the great Captain America or anything close to that horrible Spider-man TV series. And there had to be bad guys. The Hulk television show was great, but where was General Ross, the Leader or even the Absorbing Man? If you’re going to have super heroes, you have to have super villains. Let Starsky and Hutch bag all the drug dealers and purse snatchers. Then Hollywood caught up. Anything that can be put in a comic can now be believably (from our best comic fan perspective) portrayed onscreen, actors with legitimate resumes bring our most beloved characters to life, the budgets are big enough to afford not just the hero but his rogues gallery as well, and finally, Hollywood has begun to trust the source material - as best as one might expect them to anyway. The end result finds the mythologies of Superman, Batman and Spider-man elevated to mainstream and characters like Wolverine, Daredevil and the Fantastic Four are recognized, fantasized and idolized by a larger audience than I ever would have imagined.
Amid all this, I wade back in the pool. Was it because of or in spite of the media saturation? Not solely either or either together. The movies were a part of it but so was a curious itch to see what my old friends had been up to, hear their stories and meet some of their new friends and enemies and hear more stories. A reunion of sorts. One thing was certain, after seeing the movies and the cartoons and reading little snippets of news on the Internet and occasionally dropping into the comic shop, I felt I was missing something - something good and fun, something worth both my time and my money, something worth reading.
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