Comics Digest 1

Welcome to a new feature on this blog. The Comics Digest. Really it'll just be reviews of your modern-day comic book. But first, let me digress. I grew up reading comic books. My oldest brother (Jeff) collected comics when he was a kid and he was a major influence on my reading habits. However, I also found his stash of underground comix. Weird trippy tales with hardly a superhero to be found. Must say, they freaked me out a bit at the time. I'm sure I'm still scarred.

click to embiggen

But that's not what this new blog feature is about. I read his superhero comics and started buying my own (can you technically buy "your own" when the money comes from your parents?). Loved comics. At one point I had subscriptions to six or seven comics while buying others at the PDQ. The crappy thing back then was that for subscriptions the distributor folded the comic in half to put it in a brown mailing sleeve. Who wants a folded-in-half comic book?

Well, at some point I lost interest in comic books. The price per issue was becoming obscene (back then that meant a single issue was going for something like $1.25. When I first started buying them they were $.20 and $.25 cents. Now comic publishers are toying with the idea of $3.99 for a single issue. Wow. But whatever the reason back then, I stopped buying them.

Fast forward a couple of years. I still love the idea of superhero comic books, I just haven't bought any in quite awhile. I stumble across (I don't even remember the first one I stumbled across) a collection of comic books reproduced in a trade paperback format. You get the entire story (let's say the story ran for eight issues of the comic book) collected in one place. Very cool.

Sorry, no embiggening - already full size

But that's not why I started buying them again. Comic books were/are a part of my childhood. In picking up the trade paperback I was hoping to somehow recapture some of that childhood magic. Step back in time for a moment. As we all know, that's much easier said than done. More often than not you pick up something from your childhood, let's say a book you loved, re-read it and find it to be utterly dreadful. Only a child could have loved that book. My heart breaks a little bit each time that happens.

Cue victory music. That didn't happen. I picked up a few collections here and there and I found that I enjoyed them. That they really did recapture that magic I felt as a kid. The stories (and the artwork) had grown up with me. Sure, they're cheesy at times, over-the-top, and even silly, but they're still good. Some of them, as I'll review later, are excellent. Are they great literature? A couple here and there actually come close. But in whole, no. They're comic books. They're the equivalent of Taco Bell versus authentic Mexican food. But man I loves me some Taco Bell. I can appreciate Taco Bell for exactly what it is - and it's awesome. So if you can read modern-day comic books for what they are, you might love them (again) as well.

With all that said, I'm going to provide my first review in the next edition of Comic Digest because, frankly, this post has gotten kinda long. But let me throw in a couple of review caveats:

• I'm only going to review the comics that I enjoy. No bummer trips, unless something is so egregious, is such a slap in the face to readers, that it deserves to be called out.




• Most of the collections/graphic novels that I review will be superhero in nature. That's what I geek to, man. I suspect comic-book snobs (oh, believe me, they exist) will shudder at many of my selections. I'm cool with that.