Me Reading Comics RIP

I went in to the kitchen, at work last Friday, to make a drink, when I glanced over at a copy of the Metro someone had left lying around. I was instantly drawn to the picture of Batman on the front cover, not the movie Batman, but the real one from the comics. The story was reporting on the purported death of the caped crusader in the recently released Batman #681. I was hit with two emotions.

First came a sense of disappointment in Grant Morrison, for (allegedly) killing off Bruce Wayne. It's not easy to accept that one of your favourite writers has just murdered your favourite ever character. By rights, I should have been furious, but this was tempered by the fact that I haven't actually read any of the storyline in question. The second emotion that I felt was a sense of sadness at being so hopelessly out of touch with the comic book world. And it's the reasons I lost touch with them that I'd like to tell you about.

I fell in love with comics at the age of 2, when my dad bought me my first Batman Annual. I don't know why he thought it was a good idea to buy it for a toddler, or what it was that appealed to me at such a young age, but I was definitely hooked. I won't bore you with the entire history of my life in comics, suffice to say that as I got older and had access to more money, my comic consumption grew with it. By the time I started work, I was buying 40-50 comics a month and was in danger of becoming hopelessly addicted. However, within a few years it would all be over.

I offically gave up buying monthly comics in January 2002, and I know this because it coincided with buying my first house. Ostensibly, the reason was that I couldn't afford the £80+ a month when I had a mortgage to pay. And whilst that was true, it wouldn't have happened had I not been so fed up with buying comics. Please note that it was buying not reading them that I was sick of!

As a reader, I had always been a follower of writers rather than artists (which by my reckoning made me a DC-man rather than a Marvel-ite), and in those early years of the millenium there seemed to be more writers worth following than ever. With the dedication of an addict, my monthly reading list seemed to continuously grow, adding titles because I was scared of missing the next big thing. With the market how it was, the early issues of a new series would have low print runs, meaning that when it becomes popular, it's a real chore to try and catch up with the scarce issues. Even though it was annoying trying to keep track of so many different books, the thing that really killed my enthusiasm was the way that the comics were distributed.

Every month, each serious cusomer received a copy of Previews, a several hundred page catalogue of all comic book releases a couple of months in the future. It would be my job to scour the pages and detail all the titles I wanted, and then e-mailing this list my supplier; who would then post them to me when they were in stock. Now, if you give someone a list of 50 things you want from them in two months time, which they will then send to you in weekly batches, you should probably have a system to keep track of them. And I will hold my hand up and take my fair share of the blame for not keeping better tabs on my orders, but I will also point out that it was supposed to be entertainment, not a job in accountancy. Before too long, I had lost track of my orders, partly through being disorganised, and partly through a fundamental flaw in the industry.

It would be relatively simple to confirm if I had received what I ordered, if the comics were published when they were supposed to. However, it wasn't uncommon for individual issues to be delayed by several months, if not, in the odd exception, several years. The big companies, on the whole, were much better, but even they had their moments. You are then faced with the problem of trying to chase up comics that hadn't been delivered with no way of knowing if and when they will actually be published. If this was any normal industry, that had to cope without fanatical customers, then they would have gone bust years ago.

My perception for the cause of the delays was that one of the creators, more often than not a superstar penciller, is only able to complete a fraction of the pages needed for a monthly title. Now, I accept that you can't rush art, but if you can only produce five pages of finished pencils every month, then it might not be the best idea to accept a job on a monthly book. It also makes you wonder why the publishers don't move away from monthly formats for such artists. How long would you watch a soap opera for if you had to wait a varying number of weeks between episodes, and you weren't told in advance when it would be shown in the schedules? Well, even if you actually like the soaps, then I'd guess it wouldn't be for very long.

By the time I stopped buying them, I had no idea how many comics were owed to me that I never saw, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was in the hundreds. Yes, it was stupid of me to not challenge this more vigourously, but the situation definitely didn't help. When I received my last delivery, I was more relieved to draw a line under it all, than sad that there would be no more.

Maybe six years later, the publishers have their houses in order, I certainly hope they do. If not, they may well lose a lot more dedicated readers like they lost me; I still love my comics, but I'm not tempted to go back.