No sooner have bloggers and the Comics Pimp been duking it out over the best way to convey the message that Comics Doesn’t Suck than messboard users and still other bloggers are coming to the conclusion that You Know What? Yeah, Comics Does Suck. These threads at TCJ.com and this one at Sequential Tart advance the meme; John Jakala and Johnny Bacardi can’t help but ponder the same imponderables (thanks to Rick Geerling for linkage).
Me? Well, alls I can say is that today was a pretty great haul at the comics shop, one of the best New Comics Days in a while for me: Powers, Alias, Ultimate Spider-Man, Savage Dragon, Supreme Power, and Arrowsmith; I’ve been avoiding collections for financial reasons lately, but a collection of Matrix comix and Gilbert Hernandez’s monstrous Palomar collection just came out today as well, and the last month or so has seen oodles of great trades tempt my comics-buying dollar.
I don’t blame people for suddenly getting sick of the amount of crappy comics, or even just not-great comics, they’ve been buying more out of habit than anything else–this happens to all of us from time to time. I just think it’s a mistake to ascribe the decision to stop buying them to some sort of searing insight into comics versus other media. This goes double because, when you’re in a bad mood about comics in general, I’m you end up being much harder on specific comics than they deserve.
I have something of a professional (and, in the case of the blog, serious-hobbyist) obligation to keep on top of comics, both for the the publication I write for and for my own aspirations to writing comics professionally. I’m lucky enough to have a great deal of this mitigated by financial compensation for many of the things I purchase in order to keep abreast of the medium. Still, I occasionally feel jaded by how much inessential stuff I’ve accumulated. On a week-to-week basis I find I’ve purged a lot of this feeling by no longer buying no-longer-interesting titles. Mainly, though, I just enjoy the heck out of a lot of comics, and those I’m still buying.
In those TCJ.com threads, scholar Andrei Molotiu is dead right about being a devotee of an entire medium–that really is silly. That’s the fatal flaw of comics activism, too: Comics is worthy of consideration the same way film, literature, TV, music etc. are, but that’s something that will be proven to the world at large, if it ever will, by the strengths of individual works, not some vague devotion to Comics. And it’s the former, not the latter, that keeps me excited to visit the shop every Wednesday morning.
UPDATE: Please note that I’m not just some comics-hating curmudgeon who hasn’t Done His Part–I’m actually something of an activist myself. Here’s the deal: I really do think that “comics activism,” which even when you just write it or say it is self-evidently silly, is sort of dumb.