Michael Lee's Train of Thought

I've been a comics collector for almost my entire reading life. It's been my hobby reading for a long time for a wide variety of reasons. I've got wardrobes and bookcases filled with comics and comics collections.

So one of the things that I'm realizing is that I'm slowly moving away from buying regular issues -- and I suspect that for Marvel especially, I'm going to be moving almost exclusively to collecting in trade publications.

Recently I've been enjoying a number of big collections -- Captain America Omnibus, Vol. 1 is one of the best Captain America stories ever, and I can't recommend it enough.

I'm also enjoying other collections that I'm picking up -- sometimes new, sometimes used. Over the weekend I picked up the first two New Avengers collections and am enjoying them enough that I will probably get the the third.

And even for older comics, I'm preferring collected issues -- perhaps with the cheaper Essentials versions, but then various Absolute or other collected editions as well.

The sad part of all of this is I'm not sure how pure comics stores survive in the future -- I'm more likely to pick up these books in different venues -- Half Price Books, Amazon.com, or Comics Conventions are just as likely to see me pick them up. I'm not quite in as much of a "weekly comic store" habit as I used to be. I see more deals when I'm looking around in the collection market -- and more options.

And the "neighborhood comic store" has some virtues that I'm sad to see being more difficult. It's a community center -- you can have a friendly conversation with your "dealer" a couple of times a month, and get recommendations of useful things. You can run into other people on a regular basis; people that you collaborate with on your additional projects -- I've discussed CONvergence business more than once over a comic book rack.

I don't know how that stays around, or if it doesn't, what takes its place. It's a challenge.

Labels: comics