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.