About Isaac Magaña
Location: Corvallis, OR
Occupation: Computer Support
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Posts: 71
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The amount of comics one buys depends on how much you can spend. Sometimes you have to cut back your spending, which means you cut back on your books. How do you decide which books to drop?
It’s hard to stop reading comics, which makes it hard to stop buying comics. It’s as if one feeds into the other, the more comics I like the more comics I buy. What a vicious sequence of events that becomes. Okay, it’s not vicious, but after a while there will be less money available for comics. With a limited supply of money how should one decide what to buy?
If you’re like me, you have a pile of comics to read. You stack the stuff you want to read on top, and trickle your way down to the bottom. A quick way to see what’s on the chopping block would be to see which books remain at the bottom of the stack the longest, or the most often. If you have a pile 10 books high, I can see how this might work for you. If your pile is only 3 or 4 comics at any given time, this may not be a successful way of trimming down the books you read. Sadly, I don’t notice what stays at the bottom of my pile. I think it’s because it always changes and I always try to get through them so nothing really stays at the bottom.
Rather than worry about my pile, I can look at my pull list. This is a definitive list of what I read, and if there have to be cuts it has to come from this list. This list betrays me. It’s the list of the stuff that I want to read regularly, so cutting from it is going to be difficult. I could go through each title and see how much enthusiasm I have for each title. It’s my pull list so my enthusiasm is very biased, it has a very limited range between one point - “I can’t wait until the next issue”, and another point - “I want to see where this is going.” My pull list isn’t really diverse in the way I need it to be. Maybe the pull list isn’t a good idea.
Going through the pull list will only remind me of the loss I’m going to go through by cutting out some books. I could try it from a different angle. I could look at the credits and see which artists and writers I really enjoy and start dividing my books that way. That method would leave me with only the writers and artists that really entertain me and I could lose the ones that I think are good but not the ones I want to pay for in a financial bind.
How do you decide what matters most? For each person that can mean different things. When finances get low, decisions have to be made. With comics it’s about what comics are worth the money that you’re using to purchase them. For some people the comic is worth its art, for others its stories, the collect ability for some, and a mixture of stuff for others. How ever you define the value of the comics will decide which ones you’re going to pay for when you’re in a financial bind. When the times come for you to cut back, it’s good to know what you enjoy, so think carefully. It might make the decisions easier, not necessarily easy, but maybe easier.
The books that I consider dropping are the ones that I can’t remember what happened last month. I hate it when I start reading a comic and wonder, did I miss last issue?
I always read my least favorites and end with my favorites. This way I have something to look forward to as I get deeper into my pile.
It’s hard to cut comics. I’ve been reading 100 Bullets now for years and at this point it’s mostly to see how it ends. I haven’t really enjoyed it much for about two years.
Plus some comics go through a weak period. I was about ready to drop Fables until the current story line sucked me back in and reminded me of good the comic can be.
Also just read Superman at this point because I’ve been collecting it for awhile and every time I talk to my comic pimp...I mean owner...he asks me if I want to drop it. I don’t get that many comics these days so I don’t mind one or two books I’m not blown away by because I know it won’t be forever. Besides, all the Superman books feel like they are in a holding pattern until the summer extravaganza.
I recently made the decision to cut out comic purchases altogether because of finances, opting instead to only go after trades for titles I really enjoy or have heard so much good stuff about. The comic industry needs to start thinking of a new model because as the economy gets worse, people are going to stop buying as much or altogether; prices on single books certainly aren’t going down. When that happens, people will also take fewer risks on new books which means decreased diversity in the market.
Like Marc, I cut out regular comic reading about two years ago, and it was surprisingly painless. It was partly financial—working freelance is a bitch—but also because I found I was having buyer’s remorse on about 80% of what I was purchasing. Very little seemed worth the three bucks a throw anymore. So I stopped, and only occasionally pick up a trade. I really don’t miss it.