Thursday, December 10, 2009

Looking backward: old habits

Having been a comic book reader since I could read, I've developed a long perspective on comic books, with tastes that have changed a fair bit, particularly in the last few years. I've enjoyed Tom Brevoort's blog posts where he's looked back on what titles his office produced a certain number of years ago and John Jackson Miller's columns where he examines historical comic book sales data. Thinking along those lines, I wondered just what it was I was reading five, ten, even fifteen years ago.

FIVE YEARS AGO...

  • Astonishing X-Men#8
  • Cable & Deadpool#10
  • Captain America#2
  • Ex Machina#7
  • Fables#32
  • Fantastic Four#521
  • Invaders#5
  • JSA#68
  • Madrox#4
  • Marvel Knights Spider-Man#9
  • Mystique#22
  • New Thunderbolts#3
  • Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Golden Age 2004
  • She-Hulk#10
  • Spider-Girl#81
  • Stoker's Dracula#2
  • Street Angel#4
  • Tomb of Dracula#3
  • What If General Ross Had Become the Hulk?
  • Y: The Last Man#29

My buying habits really changed after I won my first real job. This is about the least conservative single-month purchase list of mine since I was 13. I had begun writing for Marvel, so I justified a lot of the Marvel purchases as "research." To the rest, now that I had money I was buying DC super heroes for the first time in more than a decade and giving creator-owned/Vertigo titles a try for the first time...ever. Still, within a few months I dropped all of the non-Marvel books on this list (except for Street Angel, which was cancelled).

TEN YEARS AGO...

  • Avengers#25
  • Avengers Forever#12
  • Blaze of Glory#1
  • Blaze of Glory#2
  • Captain Marvel#1
  • Gunslingers#1
  • New Eternals#1
  • Thunderbolts#35

I was in my last year of college and washing dishes to make ends meet. Both during and after college, I kept my comic book buying "rationed" down to four books a month. Unless a title I followed was cancelled (or I lost interest), I didn't add new titles to my monthly purchases so I had to pick the four books I enjoyed the most. However, I made an exception for the bi-weekly mini-series Blaze of Glory and the accompanying Gunslingers reprint book.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO...

  • Captain America#436
  • Generation X#4
  • Marvel Super-Heroes Megazine#5
  • X-Men 2099#17

I was in high school and although I had income from my newspaper route my interest in comics was starting to drift. This was my last month spent reading Generation X; Captain America and X-Men 2099 were the only titles I kept in touch with and I quit both of them within the year; after quitting them, I dropped out of comic book reading for almost an entire year.

No comments:

Post a Comment