Comics

When I was a kid (grade school and junior high), I actively collected, thanks to a local used bookstore that had ridiculous bulk prices on comics (Beb’s Budget Books, Levittown, PA).

Since then, about once a year, I go on a comic buying spree. The trend seems to be accelerating, though. I’ve been to the comic book store(Lee’s Comics, San Mateo, CA) 4 times in the past 6 months, each time spending more money. Either the overall quality of comics is getting a lot better lately OR I’ve gotten better at selecting great comics.

Why am I writing about comics? Jon invited me to go to this weekend’s Comics Convention. And then Dave, today, mentioned a list at PubSub for comic enthusiast.

Finally, a bit of commentary on “Infinite Crisis”, this year’s crossover event at DC Comics: The stuff leading up to the crisi s is WAY better than the actual Infinite Crisis series. I like where it’s headed, though. The idea is that the lines between good and evil have become much too gray(grey?) among the ‘heroes’ in the DC universe. I don’t think the Earth-2-Crew is going to win. This is probably not going to be a “Crisis on Infinite Earths”-level rewrite of all origins, rather it’s going to be a more evolutionary change where the heroes reflect on the evils their community has exhibited and each find their own ways to reverse or pay for those evils.

If that is NOT what happens – if the Earth-2-Crew DOES win and the past year of reflection is DELETED by a cosmic event, I imagine that I’ll be sticking to Marvel and a select group of non-mainstream DC comics for my reading sprees.

Today at work, I’ve had the hearings going on in the background and I’m struck with the parallels between the issues discussed in the Infinite Crisis(the Identity Crisis comic in particular) and the issues being discussed with Gonzales. In real life, the current topic is eavesdropping and in the fake world the topic was mindwipes, but the common theme is the beings with the most power and whether or not they are hiding unethical uses of that power. It’s funny, because I get the feeling that DC wants me to think that the mindwipes are bad and NPR probably wants me to think that the eavesdropping is bad. For me, though, I’m somewhere in between calling those actions good or bad.