Reading Comics Again

I read comics and collected them growing up, I remember quite a few times when my mom would take me and a couple friends to the store and we’d buy our books and read them on the ride home. I still have a handful of those books in the closet collecting dust. At some point I just sort of stopped collecting and reading them. It was likely a money issue, comics are expensive and when you’re young you don’t have a lot of money unless your parents are giving you an allowance.

When I did pick up a comic as an adult from time to time, it was either a comic I remembered liking as a kid or it was the artwork that caught my eye. With all the superhero movies and the number of shows about comics these days, it seems to be something that is more accessible for people now and not just something the nerdy boys read and collect.

With the amount of illustration work I do at LooseKeys, it’s always important to continue to look for inspiration. That’s one reason I started reading comics again. I also started reading them for the stories. They are a very quick read which is good because often the idea of starting a new book is a bit daunting with the schedule I keep.

Notice I said READING and not COLLECTING.

Living and working out of a two bedroom condo in Chicago doesn’t leave much room for unnecessary items. My wife and I are always trying to mimize and reduce the amout of clutter we have in our home. The idea of collecting something even with the possibility that it could increase in value, isn’t something I want to do. Holding onto a bunch of comics when we will no doubt be moving within a couple years means more heavylifting. I’ve moved my share of books from apartments and it’s no fun.

The solution to wanting to read comics but not wanting to collect them is pretty obvious. I’ve been buying and reading comics on my Nexus 7 with the Comixology app. A device I’ve really fallen in love with.

The biggest downside of this is that these books do often cost the same as if I were to pick them up in the store. It costs the publisher nothing to offer more downloads and it’s strictly a convenience to me. I didn’t want the comics taking up space so this was the perfect trade off for me.

There aren’t too many forms of entertainment that we treat as a collector’s hobby. No one has 10 copies of the first release of Titanic on DVD stored away in their basement. Hoping one day they will be able to resell them. Until just a few years ago there wasn’t a good way to read comics digitally and you had to go buy the books. Publishers only released a limited number of issues because that’s all they could sell. Then after a few issues they’d release the collection or series in a larger book for anyone who just wanted to read the story and didn’t have a chance before.

As more people start picking up comics digitally I have a feeling we might see the publishers or artists taking advantages of this. Maybe we’ll see a little bit of motion or movement in the panels à la Harry Potter. Something that doesn’t take away from the art and the story but gives the reader a richer experience. This would also justify the price and give a few animators some more work.

Having the comics digital allows me to have them with me all the time to reference or re-read. No I don’t have boxes that I can pass down to my kids to read or sell years from now but then again I’m not sure my kids will want something that isn’t digital 10 to 20 years from now.