I am 42…let me qualify that, I am a 42 year old Fanboy….capitol “F”.
And you know what that means?

That’s right, time for the old fossil to rant and rave in no particular order and with complete disregard for a proper train of thought about how good it was in the good ole’ days.

Crazy Old Man Dave has seen a lot, kiddies. I started collecting as a 7 year old. Used to get my comics at Joe’s Discount Books in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, under the tracks for the B train. 25 cents a book and Im not talking about a 21-page book from today. I mean those 80-page Giants DC used to put out with ten different stories using 2 dozen characters. All for 25 cents. I used to get 20 books a week for $5.00.

I can’t even get 2 books for that now.

They weren’t in pristine condition when I got them. This was the 70’s. (It’s true, there are people who come from that time, ask your parents!). This was before the whole “Buy three copies… one to read, one to hold on to and one to have hermetically sealed in a glass chamber filled with rare gases and protected by a concrete bunker housing guard dogs, robotic sentries and a giant tyrannosaurus on a leash” era".

Actually the giant dinosaur sounds pretty cool.

That was the time of course when the comic book industry was almost flushed down the crapper by a handful of financial advisors who saw a single CNN story about comics. You see a copy of Action Comics #1 had just sold for almost a half million dollars. They thought they had just discovered a new way to make money except they didn’t understand a damn thing about comics and so told their investors to buy multiple copies and after just a few years said copies would be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Except they weren’t.

And anyone with half a brain knew that.

And somehow that didn’t stop the disaster from happening all the same.

Marvel and DC like money a whole bunch and started churning out record numbers of their books because now they wanted to keep up with the sales. So there were readers who were buying 3 copies and people who didn’t even read the books were buying 3 copies and old ladies were buying 3 copies and the comic stores were holding back dozens of issues because even they thought they could make money from holding on to them.

And to further entice everyone, every other issue had some sort of weird cover (remember the month where all SpiderMan issues had a hologram on them?). I do. I still have them. In Mint condition you can buy one for two bucks.

And then the black and white covers because…well I’m not sure why really. I guess people wanted to see the covers in less color?

And then the foil covers and then of course you had the different artists doing different covers on the same book and then the you had the scratch-n-sniff Ant-Man’s Panties issue and then….

…well maybe not the last one but if they did that, I’m sure it would have sold.

Then people who actually read the books and in some cases were actually collecting to have something of value noticed the problem. See, the reason that Action Comics #1 is worth 1.5 million dollars today is how few copies exist in even average condition. Worldwide, there are 4 copies in 4.0 CGC condition and only one copy in 8.5 CGC condition.

People who thought that the new X-Men run at that time (1990’s – Jim Lee) was going to be worth something were mistaken as they printed well over a million copies of the issue. Today you can get copies most anywhere online for 90 cents... in Mint condition, bagged and boarded.

Great, huh?

Anyway…sorry to drift there…After Joe’s Discount Comics, I started getting my books at a local ice cream shop (sacrilege!) that was on my way home from school. Because so few people went in there for comics, I was always able to get my books with no worries. I remember being able to collect the whole original 15-issue Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, it was and is the Bible for Marvel. Every character laid out by a different artist with their whole back story, powers, weaknesses. It was awesome.

Want to know how big a fanboy I am?… here we go…I still have:

All those original issues bagged and boarded as well as:

The 20-issue Deluxe Edition

The 8-issue Update Edition

The Official Handbook Master Sheets Edition which were individual hi-gloss, double sided, 3 hole punched sheets of each character for which I created custom binders and artwork to store them in. All 840 pages of them!

I also bought the Trade Paperbacks of the original series, that was another 10 books and finally...

I bought the 3 volume black and white only version, each book being 300+ pages.

Obsessed? I think not.

After college I gave up collecting. Sold the majority of my books, maybe 2,000 issues. Many of which I ended up buying back years later, I’m sure at a higher cost than what I made on them. Bagged the rest and put the long boxes into storage.

And so there was no Super Wednesday for me for quite a few years.

In 1996, I started a new job on 24^th Street off of 6^th Avenue and one day at lunch I crossed the park and saw the sign for Cosmic Comics. I’m sure at the time I didn’t think much of that moment but I was about to drop back into the frenzy again after a 7 year lapse. Looking at those loaded shelves, I started to remember why I was hooked in the first place.

I joined the club and every week, rain or shine, I was there getting my new books.

Sadly, Cosmic is gone now. Mark sold the place recently to some (less than honest guys, I understand) and so that particular shop has gone the way so many others have. There is a tiny collection of comic stores in Manhattan now, Jim Hanley, Midtown and Forbidden Planet seem to be the biggest and even they aren’t doing amazing business anymore. Evidence of that is in how much of Forbidden Planet is devoted to comics and how much is toys, games, models, apparel, posters, DVD’s, action figures etc.

Of course none of this is why I started writing this post in the first place. What I wanted to talk about was how bad the books have gotten lately. I am so tired of collecting a series issue by issue only to have it end up being a mediocre series unworthy of keeping because I have no intention of reading it again.

In fact during the past 6 weeks, I have purchased a total of 7 new books. This from a guy who used to buy 10-15 books per week. It seems that the resurgence in comics has come solely from the movies based on the properties and that is not a good thing. There are more books based on toys and TV shows and movies than ever before (Star Trek, Transformers, the freaking Smurfs) more books that are epic-scale crossover series that require you to buy the 12 issue series itself, and then all the crossover books which in the end can mean buying every issue put out by a publisher, sometimes for a whole year or more. (Civil War, The Siege, Blackest Night, Brightest Day).

There are hundreds of books published each month and somehow I cant seem to find anything that isn’t derivative or worse, plain boring. What am I doing wrong? Not looking hard enough? Not trying new stuff?

The bigger problem of course is the utter disconnect that is being suffered by the industry. While both major houses are hiring better and more expensive writers, (in many cases traditional prose authors like Brad Meltzer and Orson Scott Card have been hired to write new stories) there isn’t enough out there to keep me excited week after week.

Better writers and artists are great for the adult, educated readers out there but that is generally people past their mid-twenties and the industry isn’t signing up many new readers. The books may be too hard to follow and are in many cases contain content that is not meant to read by kids without supervision.

I go to Forbidden Planet every week and the average age is probably 30 or older at this point. I cant remember the last time I saw a kid in there. I’m sure part of that is price… $2.99, 3.99 per book. (a 6-issue mini series can cost $24) and I’m sure part of that is the dearth of material aimed at a younger age group.

It’s ironic that we geeks and fanboys get made fun of for reading comics…”How childish” people say. “Aren’t those for kids”? they say but in the end they really aren’t written for or marketed to that group at all. And not for some time.

What does that mean, you ask? Well I believe that we are at a point where collectors are mostly men in their 50’s and older and until the younger generation gets older and hopefully starts to pick up the books there wont be enough readers to subsidize the industry.

Crazy Old Man Dave has spoken and he kindly asks you to get the hell off his lawn.

In my humble opinion, here are some books that are worthy buying and reading again and again.

Marvels
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Watchmen – no surprise there.
Marvel Boy
Civil War
Silver Surfer – Requiem
Kingdom Come (no kidding)
Y The Last Man
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Wolverine (Miller/Claremont)
All Star Superman
Daredevil: Born Again
The Dark Knight Returns (well duh) but not The Dark Knight Strikes Again
The Authority
Planetary
The Ultimates (first series)
Thunderbolts (Ellis run)
We3
Rising Stars
DMZ
Ronin
Preacher
Cerebus
The Losers
The Walking Dead
Astonishing X-Men (Joss Whedon run)
Powers
Secret Wars (original run)
Teen Titans: The Judas Contract
The Eternal (Chuck Austen)
Squadron Supreme (Waid)
The Incal (Jodorowsky)
The Nikopol Trilogy (Enki Bilal)
Midnight Nation