Reader and generally thoughtful person Michael Suileabhain-Wilson writes (edited for excessive sauciness):
I was just reading your latest post on pamphlets, I had an insight into a reason why _I_ don’t like them…
Not that I own many pamphlets to begin with, but I have a few, and I have a bunch of RPG books which are similarly poly-bagged.
Polybags totally suck.
They’re sized, by and large, to perfectly fit whatever goes in them. So you have to fumble with them to get them back in, with a reasonably good chance of fucking up either the book or the bag. It’s a pain in the ass. But the alternative is to keep them loose, which works for RPGs, but is inadvisable for pamphlets.
Thus, the mechanics of the polybag gives you an option between loose storage, which pretty much guarantees a short and ratty life for your overpriced pamphlet, or bags which are a pain in the ass and make you feel like an anal twit slavering over your precious collectibles.
It sucks and I don’t like it.
Me neither.
(Caveat: Now would probably be a good time to link to Chris Allen, who argues that a lot of these binary arguments we have about different aspects of comics are silly. Of course he’s right: Floppies vs. pamphlets are certainly not an either/or proposition. As I’ve said many times, floppies are still indispensable for the industry as a source of revenue; and as Chris points out, sometimes buying individual issues (Acme Novelty Library, for instance) is indeed preferrable in many ways to simply waiting for the trade. (I myself launched a fairly expensive Ebay odyssey to track down old Acme issues.) But Acme and its ilk are kind of the exception that proves the rule. Most floppies don’t provide anywhere near that level of bang for your buck, let alone compare to the value of trades, graphic novels, manga-formatted books, let alone other forms of entertainment. And (I keep saying this again and again as well) only 250,000 or so people buy the dopey things at all. The format’s not working, for a wide variety of reasons. It’s time to start phasing in something different.)