About ten years ago, I wrote a regular column for Borderline Magazine.
Borderline was a comics magazine in PDF format, which grew from around 56 pages when we started to around 100 when we finally ran out of money. There’s a long and involved story to be told about Borderline, but as it’s going to be told by my old friend and the editor of Borderline, Phill Hall, over on one of his various blogs I’m not going into it here (unless Phill and my memories are different, in which case there may be a blog battle).
Recently, the print magazine Wizard has ceased publication in the physical world and gone over to PDF. In the doing of it, they’ve made a shedload of PR noise about how ground-breaking they are and how there’s never been a comics magazine in this format before. Oh yes there has, sonny! TEN! BLOODY! YEARS! AGO!
However, my bitterness can wait until another time.
The column I wrote for Borderline (in addition to being Staff Writer, Features Editor, Reviews Editor, and eventually Publisher) was called Man On A Mission – a title thrown at me by Phill, just to give the poor bastard thing a name. The Mission was to find better comics, either through recommendation or, as it turned out and which was far more fun, by haranguing creators and consumers into demanding better of themselves. And if improvement didn’t happen, I was going to keep a promise I’d made to myself some time before.
I’m one of the age group who were around for Cerebus. Started with issue 36 and kept with it through to the end. Picked up as many of that initial missed 35 issues as I could find and/or afford, made them up with the Swords of Cerebus trades that predated what became known as ‘the phonebooks’.
At some point, probably in the mid-200s of Cerebus’ run, I said to myself: When this ends, it all ends. Just walk away from all of it. The end of Cerebus was going to mark my long-postponed maturity; I was going to do what any sensible man would have done a good twenty years beforehand. I was going to give up comics.
Didn’t do it. Cerebus ended, I kept going.
Still doing it today.
But over the last year or so, I’ve noticed that the number of comics I’ve been buying has slowly shrunk. I’m not excited by the greater part of the comics produced by the larger publishers. I’m taking fewer chances on new titles. I can’t be bothered to hunt down the more obscure material. Part of this is down to the fact that my supplier, Mr Gary Ochiltree of Krypton Comics And Books, is a very shrewd businessman who simply does not order anything that he can’t see a guaranteed sale on. As a result, there’s less – in fact zero – browsing of untried titles.
Add to this my uncanny knack of picking losers. When I was a teenager, my younger brother brought home the first issue of 2000AD. I read it, cast it aside like an unwanted kipper and pronounced that it wouldn’t last six months. But I’ll keep on falling for things that are doomed from the outset. One of my other regular gigs on Borderline was to write, solicit and edit something called Beautiful Losers, a semi-regular feature about failed comicbooks. Thriller. Chase. Slingers. Young Heroes In Love. Books like those. Loved by critics, shunned by readers, dead (or maybe born) before their time.
Of the nine comics I’ve bought so far this month, four have been just announced as cancelled, one was the last part of a limited series and two are selling in such low numbers they’ll be lucky to see out the next six months. Only one of the four cancelled titles counts as a Beautiful Loser (Keith Giffen’s quite gloriously off-kilter Doom Patrol, since you ask).
I can’t be bothered to go into the West End to look for shiny new things (though the last time I did, something quite spectacular happened). If I do find something that piques, I say “I’ll wait for the trade” and then probably not bother.
Slow attrition is eating away at my comics consumption. Every month I love them less and less. I can scarcely believe I’m saying this, but… it looks like I’m finally giving up.
Let’s see.
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