(Just Like) Starting Over

Jack Kirby reportedly once said “Comics will break your heart.” It’s certainly understandable how the thievery, contempt and indifference Kirby often received from his publishers (and sometimes from comics readers themselves) could have led him to make such a statement. It’s all the more damning of comics as a whole (speaking both of the industry and the readership that supports it) both when you consider that Kirby was one of the medium’s most talented creators, and that he came of age in an era when men did not generally discuss their feelings publicly, and certainly never spoke of having their hearts broken. So monumental was the failure of the industry to treat Kirby properly that he felt the need to warn others. “Comics will break your heart.”

I don’t know if comics has broken my heart, exactly, but it’s certainly driven me crazy the past year or so. Having observed the industry for forty full years now, and having written about it for over twelve years, I found this past year to really test the limits of my patience and my restraint. My utter and complete disgust regarding the unethical and unnecessary Before Watchmen filled me with rage and disappointment – rage at publisher DC Comics for doing it against the explicitly stated wishes of Watchmen writer Alan Moore and the original intent of the contract signed by Moore, DC and artist Dave Gibbons, all of whom expected that the ownership of Watchmen would revert to the comic’s creators after the trade paperback had been out of print for a year. Unfortunately for Moore and Gibbons (but especially Moore), the book’s unprecedented quality and sales figures allowed DC to keep the book in print for a quarter of a century and counting, violating the spirit of the contract, but of course hewing to the letter of the law. It must be so comforting to know that you can legally do something to obviously wrong and ethically contemptible. Good for you, DC fuckers.

You’re probably aware that my feelings about this wretched situation led to an abhorrent and ill-timed post upon the death of Joe Kubert, a legendary comic book artist who collaborated with DC in creating some Before Watchmen comics in the months before his passing. I got more angry and hate-filled comments, emails and even phone calls about that post than probably every other thing I’ve written about in the last twelve years combined. People were really pissed off, and although I didn’t appreciate the threats and name-calling, the vast majority of commentators were right that I said a really spectacularly stupid thing, at precisely the wrong time. If it’s any comfort to those still feeling anger toward me, the number of people reading my blog after that post sank deep into previously unplumbed sub-basements of Comic Book Galaxy HQ. Daily I deal with an utter lack of sunshine and the acrid stench of sulfur wafting through the halls.

But despite all that, after a few days of contemplation I had decided to keep the blog going. Some great friends and key industry figures assured me that I still had something of value to say, and unbelievably, eventually the kerfuffle seemed to quiet down. I kept on blogging, offering up a daily “Galaxy Newsbrief” with what Paul Harvey was fond of calling “News and Commentary.” But within a week or two, I realized my heart was no longer in it. It felt more like work than the joyous exercise in writing it had previously been. Yes, I saw that the pageviews remained dismal, but if that had been the only factor, I would have kept going. I’ve never cared if I was read by 10 people or 10,000, as long as I was providing something of value to my readers, and as long as I enjoyed what I was doing.

Recently, a good friend in comics – someone I’ve only met in person once but shared many intimate emails with and consider a true friend – sent me a comment from his blog that he had not approved in the moderation process. It was vile, dredging up rumour and innuendo about this person’s past and casting some pretty cruel and baseless aspersions at their present circumstances. It led to me tweeting about how comics as a community really fails to police itself and tolerates toxicity and cretinism on every level, from the fanboys spouting off in the comic shops to the psychotic nerd writers appointed to the highest levels of the corporate comics publishers.

The comment that was shared with me in my email hit me like a gut-punch, coming as it did just weeks after I was sent some pretty extreme threats and comments myself. And this, along with my ongoing despair (no, it’s not too strong a word) toward the marketplace’s acceptance of Before Watchmen has, if not broken my heart, well, it’s certainly made me sick. Sicker than I have ever felt about something that once gave me joy on a daily basis. I can barely contain my disgust for the thuggish cretins that run much of the industry, and the toxic assholes that seem to be a majority of the people who comment on it on websites, blogs and social networking sites.

I apologize for being so long-winded about this, but I thought the few dozen of you still reading this blog might be interested in knowing why I haven't updated in a while. If you still love comics, or at least some aspect of it, good for you. I remember well the joy and delight comics has brought me in its best moments, but I’ve been chasing that dragon for too long now, and lately with no good return at all on my investment. I hope comics does more than just break hearts and make people crazy in the months and years ahead, but for me, that’s about all that’s been happening for the past few months, and I need a break.

The real break began at the beginning of September, when I began returning my comics and graphic novels back to the world via eBay. You may have been aggravated by the number of tweets I posted letting people know about my auctions. Sorry about that. But I needed to get the word out that I was off-loading, as writer Tony Isabella has named his vast accumulation of stuff, my Vast Accumulation of Stuff. As I write these words, I'd say I've shed 95 percent of the 3,000 or so comics and graphic novels that were in my possession this time two years ago.

It’s a strange sort of conclusion, in that I have numerous blogs and websites dedicated to the subject of comics in one way or another. And I can’t quite bring myself to just shut them all down, despite feeling nearly certain that it will be a very long time before I have anything at all to say about comics, if indeed I ever feel the desire or need to ever again, at all. But there are other writers involved, like Chris Allen at Trouble With Comics, and Bubba at A Criminal Blog, and they are both better and and far more dedicated writers about comics than I have ever been. I hope they'll keep up their outstanding efforts, and maybe I'll even weigh in sometime, if the spirit moves me. But it won't be soon, because honestly for the first time in decades I have no idea what is going on in comics. I've stopped reading virtually all of them, and virtually every blog or website that I previously followed.

At the moment, I find myself unable to even imagine myself entering a comic book store, never mind actually browsing the comics available for purchase or worse yet, having to have a conversation about the industry or the artform, both of which I feel the need to shut myself off from.

This purge has its origins in practical reality. During a recent, lengthy period of time in which I was jobless, I found myself occasionally selling off some of my nearly 1,000 graphic novels to make ends meet. I found by bundling a few dozen and taking them to a used bookstore, or putting them up on eBay, I could make enough to cover the difference between my expenses and what I was collecting in unemployment insurance. Of course, I started with the books I re-read the least, or perhaps never imagined wanting to read again, and just writing those words I wonder why in the hell I would have kept stuff like that as long as I did. When I began this long, slow purge a couple of years ago the first books to go were graphic novels that had sat on my bookshelves for a decade or more, read once, perhaps reviewed, and then onto the shelves, never to be thought of again, except as part of an obsessive Excel spreadsheet I maintained, which is how I know at its most well-stocked, my graphic novel collection (just softcovers and hardcovers, no floppy comics included) numbered somewhere in the vicinity of 945 books.

As my connection to comics as a community and as an entertainment medium began to crumble this year, I felt the need to speed up the purge. In a weeks-long series of eBay auctions, probably over a hundred or more books went flying out my door, and into the hands of readers and collectors around the country, at sometimes rock-bottom prices, just to get them out of the house. The actual straw that broke the camel’s back – by which I mean, when I sold it, I knew I was done with collecting comics and loving and caring for that collection as a part of my daily existence – was the day I decided to auction off as a set both hardcover Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus editions along with the Amazing Fantasy Omnibus. This mammoth lot of three books collects a huge amount of Steve Ditko stories including the entirety of Amazing Fantasy and all his Spider-Man stories, and the first ASM Omnibus is a book I often thought would be the one I would grab if I only had time to grab one in a hypothetical fire that conveniently allowed me the time to save my entire family, cats included, but then somehow warned me there was only time to save one graphic novel. So when I found myself feeling virtually no regrets at all as I took pictures of those three massive hardcovers, posted the auction on eBay and then quickly sold them off with Buy It Now for less than half what all three go for separately on eBay, I knew my comics collecting days are over. There’s a life-sized Spider-Man head bust in my living room designed by Alex Ross that goes for anywhere from $175 to $300 on eBay that would already be gone if not for the fact that my wife inexplicably seems to love it and would beat me to death with it if I tried to sell it. I do have a few shortboxes of comics and a few dozen GNs left that I would like to get rid of, but none of them seem worth the time and effort of posting on eBay. If you would like to see a list in the hopes something might interest you, email me at alandaviddoane AT gmail dot com and I'll send you the list when it's complete.

Yes, my mantra has become “Everything Must Go,” just like the movie inspired by a Raymond Carver short story. Deluxe hardcovers, limited edition statues, long-held runs and sets of floppy comic books, go, go, unwanted reminders of a 40-year marriage that ended not with a bang but a whimper. Will I regret it someday, when I come out of the manic desire I have right now to shed my existence of all this crap? Perhaps. I know that if I want to read every Steve Ditko Spider-man story, a few clicks on the computer will allow me to do that any time I want, even as I recognize that that’s not the same thing as physically possessing a beautiful hardcover book collecting all those great old stories between two sturdy, hard covers. But at the moment I find myself not caring. Indeed, I find myself for the first time in forty years not really sure what to do with my leisure time. For the past few weeks it has been consumed with off-loading as many comics and graphic novels as I can. It feels something like a fever-dream, a furious need to act on the desire to end this phase of my life. After that, I wonder what will occupy my time. As a result of my withdrawal from comics, I’ve gone from subscribing to hundreds of blogs to subscribing to less than a dozen, one of which is about comics, and even that one may be deleted soon. So I find myself not even sure what to read on the internet for entertainment, for information, for my vast desire to know more. I still want to know more, but for the first time in a long time, I am not sure what I want to know about, if indeed I want to know about anything. My reading habits feel irrevocably altered, just like starting over, but I don’t know where to start.

Man, this is long. Sorry about that. It's actually a combination of two posts I've been sitting on for a few weeks but decided to combine into one. What it really all is about, though, is this:

The  best advice I can give you is, if you find yourself in a similar place as me, unable to enjoy comics and outraged, disgusted or made crazy by the industry and the community, take a breath. Step away. Do something else. Do anything else. You might find it feels better than you could ever have guessed. For me, I am starting to feel free from something that was really becoming bad for me. I feel like I can breathe a little better. It's a start.