mmmm define irony

I have to make the confession up front.

I’m not a leave it in its box kind of guy.

I’m just not, I once bought a Jurassic Park T-Rex pristine in its box for 15 years and within 15 seconds of being in my care it was out of that box.  You have to let these things breathe.

So you can imagine that I don’t leave my comics in bags, I don’t have cotton gloves and special tweezers to examine my comics and I certainly don’t see them as any form of investment other than in my sanity.

But a lot of people do.

I’m not knocking you guys but honestly you’re going to have to hang on to that Superman #75 for a very long time to make any money, I’m talking pyramid construction kind of years.  Comics from this era are not worth golden age prices because the market is different.  Better paper, more issues and everyone is collecting, it does not make for rare comic books.

So stemming off of yesterday’s post and the discussions it generated I’m now wondering about the impact of digital comics on the stories and art.  I don’t so much mean in a display point of view, that’s fairly standard but I mean what happens when you take the collector aspect out of comic books.

You wouldn’t buy two digital copies of Deadpool #45 just because one has an alternative cover featuring whatever character has either a movie coming out or is a) Wolverine or b) Deadpool (an alternate Deadpool comic book cover featuring Deadpool… how meta) but there are plenty of people who appear to buy the physical version for collector and investment reasons.

Well that gimmick probably won’t work, I say probably, I mean these are still people we’re talking about here.  So when you remove the resale or collectible aspect of a comic book what do you have left?

Story and art.

So now you can’t rely on that guy who just buys every single issue of every Batman related title because he has to haves thems because they’s his precious.  (yeah I know that was a really hard sentence to read, it was hard writing it, I think it came out different to what was in my head)

If a series that features a Batman related character has poor art and poor storylines then I would hope that without the collectible status that readers just wouldn’t buy that book any more.

The lessor known, less effective I'm on a horse Old Spice campaign

So with no more gimmicks apart obviously from motion comics and soundtracks etc you return the merit system, we as a comic book reading public should hopefully reject poor story lines or poor art and no longer buy books to complete collections or because one day they might be worth something!

Of course now that I think about it, potentially it could work in favour of those limited readership books, with no printing costs and the potential to be added to a library that people could continue to purchase from for years and years, maybe the big companies could carry some indie books that have limited appeal.

Maybe Aquaman will get his own series again?!