Random Thought Of The Day #510

Day 510

I know this is like the 37th time this week I've talked about comic books, but the whole business has been on my mind a LOT in the past few months.

Between the upcoming Superhero party, my own itch to finally finish & publish one of my own creations & news articles, plus my love of pretty much every superhero movie made (except the 2 Joel Schumacher Batman movies... fuck those things), even the cheesy ones, comics have  been in my head.

I grew up on them. But oddly enough, it actually took a hospital stay to get me to read them. I just didn't "get" it until then, I guess. I made mention of this a little while back but when I was a kid, I broke my head. Spent like 3 weeks in the hospital & in my boredom, my mom picked me up some comics from the gift shop. That was the end.

I pretty much read comics regularly for the next 18 or so years. I think I was 10 when that happened, and until about 2008, I read them regularly. I'd take a year or so off here and there, but inevitably come back to them because it was cool. In that super geeky way. It was fun. It was creative. It was... just awesome.

But then I stopped a few years back. The prices were getting out of hand, my money was being redirected towards more and more kink-related things & living expenses and I just kinda... stopped. I just couldn't justify dropping nearly $100 month on them anymore. Cause there was always something ELSE I wanted to start reading too.

But I digress.

Marvel has finally decided to go day-to-date with their digital publications of new comics. Meaning that you can buy a comic in physical format in the stores or you can download it digitally the same day. DC did this recently, but fuck DC. (I'm still pissed off about them integrating the Wildstorm Universe into their primary DCU. And for censoring the shit out of The Authority. And for cancelling Wildcats Version 3.0. And for not even publishing the last issue of StormWatch: Team Achilles. And pretty much half of everything else they've done in the past decade since Warren Ellis stopped writing for them.)

But I still can't get entirely on-board with digital comics. I don't know why.

I guess it's one of those things with physically holding something in my hands and flipping pages. I think that's why I can't really bring myself to get into e-books either.

Maybe it's also because I can't flip thru a new book on the shelf & check it out, maybe read an issue or 2 at the store before deciding if I want to add it to my reading list. I can't count the number of new books that I'd pick up from just reading an issue in the store & saying "yeah, this looks fun" and then add it for a few months on a "trial basis" before deciding if I wanted to keep reading it.

Maybe it's because I can't go thru the same "ritual" (of sorts) when I get that new stack of comics or box of comics from the mail-order place. I'd get the box monthly. Then I'd rip it open & start unpacking things. Then, I'd organize the stack into my reading order with some books that were ALWAYS on top (mostly the primary X-books or Wildstorm stuff). And then, near the end of the month, as I was getting close to the bottom of the stack, I'd figure out which books I wasn't really as into as I had been and start debating dropping them. And then... finally, right before the new box would get here for the following month, I'd re-organize them alphabetically and begin the process of adding all these new books into the long boxes.

Maybe that's why... because I can't throw digital comics into a long box and watch the number of boxes grow anymore. I can't go back thru them every few years and pull out a box or so worth (when I'd have added 4 or 5 in that time frame) and decide it was time to see what I could get for them on Craigslist or ebay or something.

And this is odd... Reading is the one form of entertainment where I need to have the physical object in my hand. To see how far I've gotten thru it or how much I've accumulated. Every other form of entertainment? Video games, movies, tv shows, music... whatever... (ok, maybe not strippers... they're forms of entertainment, right?) every other form of media, I do everything I can to eliminate the physical removable media. I rip movies into m4v files to throw into my iTunes folder on the media center. I rip music into mp3 & put them there as well. Same with TV shows. I download the games I can to my xbox whenever I can instead of having the disc.

Maybe it's because they're just a piece of plastic with data on them. The paper from books & comics just feels more warm than the data-loaded plastic of dvds & cds.

I don't know though... I just can't quite get into digital books or comics nearly as much as I can the physical formats.

And there's my "deep insight into things Joe loves in order to humanize him & maybe throw off suspicion that he's actually a sociopath who hates you all" moment of the day.