PopSyndicate.com

How many times have you held yourself back from buying that one book? How many times has it made you feel good for doing so? There are advantages for both us the readers, and everyone else involved, if we could just show some restraint.

With so many great comics on the shelves now, deciding which ones to buy and read is becoming a tough challenge. Do I get Trinity? Do I get Daredevil? Do I get both Final Crisis and Secret Invasion? What about Ex-Machina? No matter how much we really want to get something we all show some restraint. It’s hard to do, but it is something we should be proud that we can do.

There are many books out each month and readers, like myself, enjoy following a character, writer, or artist. We do it because we are fans of the work. The work has a tendency to expand out to more than one comic series. A good writer does more than one book, a good artist will draw other books, and a character will either join a team or have a mini-series. This causes more books to hit shelves and causes fans to make a decision on how much their enjoyment influences what they buy.
.
Here, restraint comes into play. Great characters, writers, or artists, are not the only things on the shelves. Sure, there are other books that deserve a chance but there’s something else that causes a concern for restraint. Will this other work be any good as work it’s derived from? If I enjoy Blue Beetle and he’s joined Teen Titans, there is a chance that his joining the Teen Titans will not be as fun to read as Blue Beetle in his own series. There’s also a chance that what occurs in Teen Titans doesn’t affect what happens in his own book.

Having restraint would prevent me from purchasing every book in which Blue Beetle appears. Not because they are all bad and pointless, but because those other books might not give me the enjoyment that the original series does. When the other books come and go and I read an issue of Blue Beetle and enjoy it, my restraint will feel justified. I’ve saved money and have not lost any enjoyment of the main book.

When many books from the same source hit shelves, plots become watered down, characters get annoying, and themes are overused. Wolverine is the example that often comes to the minds of readers. It seems that he is in every book, alongside his own series, plus in some additional mini-series. He’s becoming overexposed, and the reason he stays that way is because people don’t know how to show restraint when it comes to Wolverine.

Wolverine is a great character, but with so much exposure and little fan restraint, it’s become really hard to tell. Next time you find yourself buying multiple copies of anything, try and practice some restraint, it will do you some good. It will do some good for the artists, writers, and characters as well.