Switching To Trades
I've been reading comics for a very long time, whether British kiddy comics, US superhero stuff, or more mature imprints like Vertigo. I've twice lapsed in any extended manner - once in my teens when I couldn't afford to support the habit, and the second time in the late 90s when I just kind of lost interest for a while. I'm not even sure what it was that caused me to drift back into them, but since I did I've been buying US comics month in and month out, the bulk being Marvel titles, some Vertigo, and a solid minority of creator-owned material. Having The Mrs share a lot of my preferences in this stuff helps of course. I've written enough about them on this blog over the years that I have a posts category for them.
But, and it's interesting that this has been encroaching at the same time as the MMO malaise crept in, I've lost interest in a very large proportion of the things I've been following solidly for years. Titles and creators that used to excite me... don't. News sites and feeds I used to keep an eye on daily go unread for weeks at a time. And we've made a policy decision that those few titles which still interest us we're going to switch from monthly publishing to buying the collected editions of. Most of these titles are part of relatively established ongoing collection programmes, and it just means we wait a few months to read a story in one hit rather than issue by issue. In truth, a lot of the time things have been going unread until after the next issue comes along anyway. PLUS: the collections look far more presentable on a shelf.
So we're not giving up on them completely, but we are cutting back, and changing our approach to them. And even what I feel like I want to follow I'm not hugely enthused by.
Between this and the fading of MMO interest, I'm wondering if horribly belatedly I'm turning into a grown-up.