What in the World? BAMPH!

I've said it before and I'll say it AGAIN! It's pretty sad when someone of my age can easily say, "I remember when such-and-such only cost so-and-so!"

And today kiddies, I bring up the topic of...COMIC BOOKS! Yeah! (Well, you knew it was coming!) When i first started reading comics, they were 75 cents to a buck. Not bad on a salary of $3 a week depending on chores.

As a teen, comics steadily increased. At the time I was reading anything X-men or Batman, depending on the current writer and artist of said book. When I stopped buying comics they were all around $3 each.

EACH!

I have no idea what they run today, I'm afraid to ask. I haven't bought a comic in roughly 10 years. Every now and then I scan eBay for a much sought after Trade Paper Back (reprinted, collected issues bound into one book) but that's about it. It's like buying DVDs now. Give a few months and you can probably buy it cheaper on eBay.



Here's one of my main gripes. All the titles do it. Batman, Superman, X-man, Spiderman... You don't just have one Spider-man book. You have
The Amazing Spider-man
Spider-man
Spider-man and Friends
The Ultra-Deluxe-Super-Duper-Spidey
Spider-man's Arch-Rival Venom

Ok, say you like to read only The Amazing Spider-man. That's fine but the story will often spill over into Spider-man and Friends. (more simply put, to be continued in The Amazing Spider-man) Or when the story gets good and confusing there will be a caption which reads, "See Super-Duper Spidey issue #12)

Why do they do this? Why do they need 12 titles per character? To get yer money! Sub-Characters get their own monthly comic, there are mini series and special one time books...
Really, the list goes on and on!

The biggest problem I had with X-men is that it would always say "See issue #72" while I was currently in issue #357.

Do you know how hard it would be to find and get a 25 year old comic, not to mention the cost?! It's ridiculous!

Oh, and then...THEN all the comics decided to print their pages on the "glossy" magazine-stylr paper instead of the old, notebook-paper-like stuff. When that happened, comics shot up like a dollar each after steadily increasing by a quarter here and there.

That's when I dropped it.

All the majors were dying and coming back to life to drum up business. (Batman had his back broken, Stuperman--yes, Stuperman--died. Half the X-men died on a regular basis...) Each storyline would span the characters' 12 comic book titles and if you wanted to know what was going on, you just had to buy them all.

It's just a money making campaign. That's why I never read the Onslaught series for X-men. We have the books, Shawn book them in high school. It sounds too confusing and he thinks we might be lacking a couple issues for the 872 books that it spans in.

Want a taste of what he told me? Ok, Jean Grey destroys Magneto and Prof. X for some reason or another. The two men come together to make one man, held together by a child. Meanwhile, the entire Marvel universe--meaning every single character in play by the publisher, Marvel--is affected. Meaning that you have buy the Incredible Hulk books, the Spidey books, and so on. The story teleports around more than Nightcrawler. BAMPH!

Huh? That's what I said.

Life is short. Give me the jist of it and I'll be happy enough with that.

Here's another little kicker: Extra Issues

What's that? An excellant question! DC Comics ran a "Zero Hour" thing back in the 90's. I don't remember what it was, but it affected every single DC character and comic book. Even though Detective Comics was first published in the 40's, they had issue #0 come out. Every DC comic had a new issue #0.

Zero. And some lame brain came up the 1/2 issue thing. There were comics numbered 1 1/2 (one and a half!) and the idea spilled over into all the publishers and all other comic books.

Making any sense yet? Can you see why I stopped reading comics? Here's a little known fact and bit of useless information: DC Comics only keeps the Batman titles going so they can franchise. They make WAY more money lending the Batman name to Warner Brothers and Hasbro than they do selling comics.


So...What in the World Has Happened to Comic Books? They used to be a cherished past time. Something to get a kid through his or her boredom. These days, they are filled with pornography, obsene amounts of violence (a little violence is good, but don't overkill) heaving bossoms and thongs everywhere, and wretchedly high prices.

I miss the days when I could pick up a comic for one dollar and not have the story to be continued. I miss the days when kids and adults alike didn't crave so much blood and guts and T&A.

I remember back in the day when comics weren't boycotted and cost 75 cents.