Over at CBR last week, Timothy Callahan in his When Words Collide column had an article up that’s covering some very familiar ground– the floppy vs the trade. In that article, Tim discusses his preference (the floppy– henceforth referred to here as “the single issue” for my buddy David) and his own reasons for liking single issues:
Now I’ve heard the same thing before, even once from Brian K. Vaughan (but I’ve lot the link to that one) and this idea that something is “lost” is one I’ve actually struggled with. I think I’ve made it well known that a lot of my own buying and reading habits have switched from single issues to collections over the past couple of years. I’ve done this for many reasons, particularly because I’ve gotten to like the experience of reading and rereading comics again in a book format rather than as single issues. To borrow from Heidi MacDonald, the collected edition is the “satisfying chunk” of storytelling that, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t exist in many single issues nowadays. At least, to me it very rarely exists in single issues. Also, thanks to my very disorganized non-method of filing comics away, it’s far easier to grab a collection of a book than to track down 6 or 8 issues to reread. Being able to grab a book and read a number of issues together is simply a more enjoyable experience to me than trying to track down the individual single issues.
What really struck and perplexed me in Tim’s article is this:
It perplexes me because I’m not too sure whether I agree with him or whether I think he’s totally off base. For the majority of Marvel and DC books, I think Tim may be on to something here. Since I’ve made the switch on mainstream super-hero books, I find that more and more I don’t care what’s really happening. The more I think of it, the more I realize that the last time I was invested into the DC universe was during 52, when I was buying a weekly book that kept me invested. Now I just pay attention to what’s happening in the JSA and Green Lantern. While not weekly, the last time I really cared about Marvel was when I cared about The Avengers, before they really lost me with Civil War and Bendis’s infatuation with Skrulls. There’s still elements of both worlds that I enjoy but overall, I just don’t care and that can probably be tied into my lack of caring about them on a weekly or monthly basis.
I do find that I’m enjoying the idea of individual characters much more. Using Spider-Man as an example, I’m really digging his Brand New Day run, now in 4 collections. It’s fun, relatively self contained and offers everything I want from the character in a single place. Same with how Brubaker has crafted his larger Captain America story. Both of these titles I read only in trades and I think I’m as invested in them, maybe even more so, because I have a lot of time to ponder and reflect in between the collections, rather than trying to remember what’s going on month-to-month.
Yet I don’t think that because I’m buying some stuff on a collected basis means that I’m “watching the Discovery Channel” from my living room. I think I’m in the thick of things with the books that I am still invested in. The Amazing Spider-Man has been, for lack of a better word, amazing since “Brand New Day” and I love reading the collected forms of that. Last week, I was jonesing for a new Green Lantern fix and a new GLC trade gave me that.
All of that says nothing about books like Doktor Sleepless, Hellboy, BPRD or Star Wars Legacy, books that I’m barely hanging on, waiting for the next collection. I don’t understand the idea that I’m not properly experiencing these books by not getting them monthly. Guess what? By still getting them only once or twice a year, these are still serialized stories. While I dropped Captain America shortly after the relaunch, I’ve spent the last couple of years watching Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting build up the Winter Soldier and their story, waiting for the conclusion of the story which I should hopefully get in a few weeks when I get the book. These are all characters and stories that I’m into even if I only get a new one once or twice a year. If nothing else, I do find that I’ll flip through collections many times in between releases, looking for things that I may not have noticed or just remembering the story.
In the end, like Tim, I’m just defending my own reading preference. I actually understand his, having read and preferred my weekly and monthly fix of comics for over 30 years, but it’s changed in the last couple of years. In the end, I think that there’ll will actually be a blended distribution, maybe leaning a bit more heavily towards graphic novels and collections with your top tier characters (Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, etc…) getting a monthly serialized format through a different distribution chain than currently exists.
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Tags: comics
“henceforth referred to here as “the single issue” for my buddy David”
Awww.
Thanks, Scott.
I’m gonna have to jot down my thoughts on ‘collections vs. single issues’ one of these days.
Great post.