COMMENT: Buying Habits…and How to Change Them

First, read Ed Cunard’s post criticizing the Independents’ Day campaign (read the comments, too), then read my intro to yesterday’s On the Shelves. Both got me thinking about the comics I currently buy and enjoy, how they compare to what I was buying and enjoying this time last year, and offered a bit of insight into why my to-read pile is growing out of control.

In the comments to Cunard’s post, I mention a conversation I had the other night:

…about the cyclical nature of comics buying, how some of us move from nostalgia/habit to experimentation to comfort, while others get locked into a particular mode, by choice or lack of awareness. Where I think I’ve been shifting into comfort mode recently, only buying comics I enjoy regardless of what genre or publisher, this Independents’ Day is a great idea for those stuck in nostalgia/habit mode.

Ed and others have issues with the Independents’ Day idea, some valid, some overly nitpicky. In the end, though, I’m a believer in taking action, and if there’s a group of fan/creators who see the ID campaign as a rallying point that will inspire them to taking action, more power to them. IMO, it’s similar to The Hive, except the ID campaign focuses on the Direct Market while The Hive is attempting to look beyond it. Both are valid concepts with great intentions, and you could nitpick either of them to death if you have nothing better to do, but they can really only be judged by their end results.

Anyway, the buying habits thing jumped out at me in the midst of all of this as I’m on the verge of drastically overhauling my pull list. Again.

When I started this blog, I was on the fringes of “nostalgia” mode, enjoying some of the stuff I remembered from my youth, but starting to seek out new things to read. Overwhelmed by the variety of comics on the racks every Wednesday, I did what I do in mainstream bookstores when I’m looking for something new: I browse until I find something that strikes my fancy. Sometimes it’s the author; sometimes it’s the back cover copy or a blurb from a writer I like; sometimes it’s the cover image itself (though that’s more often a turnoff than an inspiration, especially with genre fiction). It’s certainly never the publisher. In fact, of my favorite writers — Larwence Block, Matt Ruff, Carl Hiaasen — I have no idea who publishes their work, nor do I care.

While I’m browsing the shelves, comic or otherwise, I’ll sometimes come across a title or author I’ve seen mentioned in a magazine, or online somewhere — a review, an interview, possibly even an ad — and that ding of familiarity will combine with something about the book itself, as mentioned above, and I’ll do the flip test, randomly turning to a page and reading what’s there. If I like it, I buy it; assuming, of course, that it fits into whatever budget I’ve alloted for the purchase. There have been many instances where one book was left on the shelf in favor of another more interesting one, and when it comes to comics, such a decision often leads to a pull list adjustment, an occurrence I’d wager is way more common than not.

Over the past year or so, as I’ve made my way through the aforementioned cycle, the balance of my reading for pleasure has shifted drastically, from approx. 65/35 books/comics to the current 10/90 books/comics. Because comics are cheaper (by the unit) and quicker to read, and as I started writing more and more about them, my appetite grew voraciously, to the point where if I come home with less than 15 comics on a Wednesday nowadays, it qualifies as a “light week” and I probably picked up a TPB or two to make up the difference. As a result, the pile of comics I’ve yet to read is daunting — especially when you add in the stack I picked up at the Con — growing larger every week and sapping a bit of the pleasure from the experience as I feel obligated to plow through them as quickly as possible, despite not having the time to do so.

Back to the cycle — nostalgia/habit to experimentation to comfort — and I stress that it’s a cycle, and probably should include abstinence, which many of us have dealt with at least once and can occur at any point in the cycle. The experimentation mode has lasted over a year for me, spurred partly by my not wanting to get bored with this blog by reviewing the same 10-15 comics every month, and later, feeling an obligation to be familiar with as much of what was out there as possible. Over that time, I’ve also started to receive more and more review copies of books which I feel obligated to, you know, review at some point, but simply don’t have the time.

While I enjoyed the early stages of the experimentation phase, the exhilarating sense of discovery every time I stumbled across a Skyscrapers of the Midwest or Elk’s Run or Runners, it’s gotten to the point where it’s just not as exciting as it used to be.

TANGENT: I don’t know why exactly, but I’m suddenly reminded of something I read a couple of years ago, about Christopher Columbus’ final days, in Eduardo Galeano’s MEMORY OF FIRE: I. Genesis:

The ocean will not be called the Sea of Columbus; nor will the new world bear his name, but that of his Florentine friend Amerigo Vespucci, navigator and pilot master. But it was Columbus who found dazzling color that didn’t exist in the European rainbow. Blind, he dies without seeing it.

Not sure where that fits in, and I’m certainly not comparing myself to Columbus, but it came to me so clearly just now that I had to throw it out there.

/TANGENT

My favorite part of Ed’s post, and the part I most agree with, is this:

Maybe it’s getting older. Maybe it’s losing passion. Maybe it’s my slow slide towards cynical entropy. Maybe Tom Spurgeon, bad influence that he is, helped me decide that I don’t have to support a comic book just because it is self-published or from a small press when he wrote about the “Team Comics” mentality in The Comics Journal #250.

Or, taking it more in the glass half-full way, maybe it’s because I am seeing success stories–books like Black Hole doing well in the bookstore trade and at certain comics shops; NPR features on Persepolis, R. Crumb and Dan Clowes; seeing First Second ads in almost every Publisher’s Weekly newsletter I get (and not just the comics-related ones); films like A History of Violence and the upcoming Art School Confidential that show others are getting hip to the idea that “comics” doesn’t necessarily mean “superheroes,” even if the vox populi of online fandom doesn’t voice it; manga and graphic novels becoming a major force in mainstream publishing (even if some still maintain that manga isn’t comics, for whatever reason).

Familiarity really does breed contempt, sometimes, and I’ve found, particularly in the comics blogiverse, that the longer one’s been writing about comics, the more likely they are to come off as cynical, sometimes even contemptuous of…well, everything. It’s one of the main reasons I got out of the poetry scene: I’d become so cynical that I couldn’t even find much joy in the things I liked. (And no, I’m not saying that’s where Ed is.)

So, nostalgia/habit to experimentation to comfort. I’m making the shift into comfort over the next couple of months and, as a result, I’m sharpening up the pull list axe. Who lives? Who dies? Who gets pushed to trade only? Find out next month!

Seriously, though, if you’ve read this far, all four of you, where are you in the cycle?

Written by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Content Officer for LibraryPass, and former publisher & marketing director for Writer’s Digest. Previously, he was also project lead for the Panorama Project; director, content strategy & audience development for Library Journal & School Library Journal; and founding director of programming & business development for the original Digital Book World.

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