Burned Out On Comics

I'm a pretty big nerd. I love shared universes. That's one of the biggest reasons I get so sucked into stuff like Star Wars and especially superhero comics. I like that while I'm reading about Spider-Man fighting the Sinister Six, Captain America is out there stopping some recently uncovered Nazi superweapon while the X-Men are on a mission to rescue a mutant that just discovered his new powers. And if I want to find out what else is going on, I can go read about it. It makes the world seem alive and full. The problem I've had with comics lately is that I pretty much HAVE to read all of it in order to make sense of any of it.



When I first started reading comics, back in the olden times of the early 90's, you could follow whatever books you wanted without having to worry too much about the story getting hijacked by whatever Things-Will-Never-Be-The-Same!!!! Big Event comic that's coming out that summer. I could read X-Men and know that, while they might be helping save the universe in a different book, it wasn't going to drastically effect the story I was reading and, presumably, enjoying. Now, everything gets hijacked for around six months to tie into whatever Universe Defining Crossover is going on, so if I want to make any sense of what's going on, I need to buy said Universe Defining Crossover. And usually the 18 One Shots that are the prologue to the crossover. And it never stops. It was fine when Events happened every few years because they felt special, now we get a brand new status quo every year. You get three months to explore the new status quo, then three months to build up to the Big Event that will set up the new status quo, then a 6 issue mini-series that sets the new status quo. Wash, rinse, repeat. You never get enough time to fully explore all the cool ideas of a status quo before it's time to set up a new one. There's no slow burn, it's just hit your story beats and move on. Not to mention the cheap "shocking" deaths that get used as marketing gimmicks because the mainstream press eats them up. I know it's comics but can we at least pretend that dead means dead for a few years rather than plant the seeds for a character to come back 5 minutes after they die?


That all leads me to not really want to keep reading comics. There's still good stuff out there (I highly recommend Grant Morrison's Batman and Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four runs, if you're into good comics. Which both have recent character deaths, but handled really well within the story) but it just doesn't seem worth the effort to me of going to the comic shop every week anymore. Digital comics are always a few months behind and overpriced (Guys, you are not incurring printing or shipping costs on digital comics, you can stop charging as much as a print copy). I can pretty much wait til something I want gets put into trade format and get it from Amazon for less than buying the individual issues.  I realize that I'm only one person, but I imagine there are other big time comic fans that are also getting turned off of comics because of these issues. I just want to give Marvel and DC my money and they do everything they can to drive me away.