Where can I buy comics?

Your first stop should be your local comic shop! The staff of any local comic shop will be your best guides to the world of comics and can put dozens of great comic books – single issues or graphic novels – in your hands in seconds. How can you find a local comic shop? Try this link.

Not everyone lives near a local comic shop. If not…

Barnes & Noble and other large bookstores carry some comics each month in their magazine sections. Those bookstores also have sections where you can find collections of a comic book series. These collections are called graphic novels. A graphic novel usually contains a complete story that was previously published over, say, six months in the comic book. Except for comics published for kids, assume that a single, regular comic book on the newsstand only contains one chapter in a longer story. If you can, buy a graphic novel instead.

You can also buy graphic novels on Amazon.

Some comics can be bought and downloaded through computer, smart phone, and tablet apps like Comixology or from comic book publishers like Marvel Comics or DC Comics.

Where do I start?

Here’s how to narrow it down: What do you like to read or watch on TV? What movies do you like? (If you want to give comics to someone else, ask yourself what they like.)

Comics aren’t just for kids, and aren’t just superhero stories; they’re a storytelling method. Any kind of story can be told through comic books, and sometimes more imaginatively than Hollywood can because comics don’t suffer the special effects or creative limitations of movies or TV. Creativity in comics is only limited by the imagination of the writer and artist.

I’ve put together boards on Pinterest with a few places to start. Here’s the overview, or click the links below. (Quick links for suggestions for your family are near the bottom of the list.)

Superhero comics

Pulp comics (like Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian…)

Women Who Kick Butt! (strong women characters like Wonder Woman, female private eyes…)

Kung fu (like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, classic samurai movies, and more…)

Swords and Sorcery (Dungeons & Dragons, Conan the Barbarian, Game of Thrones… and some Vikings…)

Political and current affairs (not partisan politics, but imaginary tales about a Second American Civil War, environmentalist crusaders living in the wake of ecological collapse, autobiographical tales of growing up in Iran…)

Funny comics (because sometimes you just need to giggle. To yourself. Quietly.)

The Ongoing Adventures of Characters You Know (Some of your favorite movies and TV shows live on as comics, like Star Wars, The Lone Ranger, G.I. Joe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer… even Planet of the Apes!)

Science Fiction (that make Star Trek look like Fisher-Price…)

Movies based on comic books (Some you know… some you should know about)

Spies, espionage, and covert operations (Nothing is what it seems…)

Superhuman Fiction (If someone had superpowers, how would they really behave? What would they really care about? Imagine superpowered investigators of conspiracies… superpowered architects…)

Steampunk (Jules Verne’s literary descendants…)

Westerns (You didn’t think The Lone Ranger just rode off into the sunset, did you?)

Crime, film noir, private eyes, and femme fatales (Like Pulp Fiction? Like Breaking Bad? Hold onto your hat…)

Horror stories (Allllllll kinds of The Dark…)

Mysteries, meaning, and wonders of life (Comics that will make you think. Comics that will make you hug your family. Comics that will make you consider your mission in life.)

The Edge (Stunning mindbenders… a psychic detective who can tell who committed a murder by tasting the body… teenagers trapped in a sadistic private school… the stories of what happened to fairy tale characters after “they lived happily ever after”… superhumans so powerful they decide to change how the world works…)

Comics for your kids

A Professional Futurist Forecasts Outcomes for the Comic Book Industry

The following are “thumbnail scenarios” of potential futures for the comic book industry. They are depictions of different outcomes for the industry based on decisions that industry professionals face today. Futurists use scenarios with clients to help them avoid surprise and prepare for as many different futures as possible.

These scenarios hinge on two crossroads the industry faces now — whether it should prioritize online or print delivery, and whether it should prioritize maintaining its niche market or work to reintroduce comic books to mass markets.

The resulting scenarios are presented as broad themes rather than as precise predictions and are built on somewhat artificial dichotomies. (The author recognizes the “either/or” distinctions may be overstated, and that an industry can strategically act in “both/and” manners. The variables in the scenarios are meant to depict emphasis, not totality of action.) Scenarios are constructed in these ways to provide clear distinctions among the scenarios and to make them easier to discuss.

The scenarios are here as a .pdf file. This file is the easiest to view and print.

Scenarios for the Near Future of the Comic Book Industry by Cassidy S. Dale

They are authored by Cassidy S. Dale, a professional futurist. He offers these scenarios free of charge as a way of giving back to an industry that has given him much over the years.

Cassidy S. Dale works as a futurist for the United States Government and also advises it on religious extremist movements. Prior to his government work he worked in Baptist ministry and continues to teach in the Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) program in the Theological School at Drew University. He holds a Master of Science in Studies of the Future from University of Houston – Clear Lake (1996). He is the author of The Knight and The Gardener: Worldviews Make Worlds. He can be reached via cassidy.dale@gmail.com

Amy D. Dale (Cassidy’s sister) works as a professional graphic designer. She can be reached via amydale23@yahoo.com

The scenarios are here as an image file for use to post the scenarios to Pinterest.

The scenarios are here as a Pinterest post.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/370632244306986516/ 

Important! Single issues of comic books may not contain an entire story!

Comics that are published for kids usually contain an entire story in a single issue.

But comics that are written for teenagers and adults, especially superhero comics, are more like serialized fiction. Assume that a single, regular comic book on the newsstand only contains one chapter in a longer story. If you can, buy a graphic novel instead. Graphic novels look like oversized paperback or hardcover books, and each one contains a complete story that was told over, say, six issues of the comic as it appeared on the newsstand. If you’re just starting out reading comics, it’s often best to get a graphic novel rather than single issues.

On the Pinterest boards above, I end each description of a comic with the graphic novel to start with rather than just the first issue. (First issues tend to be hard to find, and sometimes rare and very expensive. Graphic novels tend to cost $10-15 each in paperback. A single issue tends to cost about $3.95 nowadays (unless the issue is older, rare, and thus more expensive), so buying a graphic novel is less expensive than finding all the single issues of the same story.

Why are comics so different from when I was a kid?

There is a long story for why this is. The very short version is that:

During the 1980s and 1990s, many comic book companies stopped (or ramped down) selling comic books in grocery stores and drugstores and instead cultivated the creation of specialty stores for comic books. These specialty stores are fantastic places – every comic book fan has their favorite – but the shift sort of ghettoized the industry. (Imagine if you could no longer buy greeting cards in grocery stores and drugstores and could only buy them in special greeting card stores that were often difficult to find – you’d probably buy a lot fewer cards and you might even forget that greeting cards are being made. That’s pretty much what happened with comic books.)

By the end of the 1990s, the number of comic book buyers shrank, and became more a population of diehards. The result was like the difference between someone who enjoys Star Trek and hard-core Trekkies. Mainstream comic book writers began catering to this hard core, longstanding fan base more than making their comics accessible to the new reader. (The guys on The Big Bang Theory are examples of these hard core fans, but a bit exaggerated because they’re on a comedy show. Hard core comic book fans aren’t hopeless nerds; they’re just like anyone who’s passionate about a hobby and have become a little insular about it.)

At the same time, the average age of the comic book buyer went up. This was a marketing demographic issue. The teenagers of the 1990s and 2000s tended to have the disposable income (and interest) to buy videogames rather than comic books, so a generation gap emerged. Baby Boomers and Generation X continued to buy comics and make up a large percentage of the hard core comic buying community, while the Millennial Generation (born 1981 to maybe 2005) bought videogames instead.

Around 1999 or 2000, market research surveys of comic book buyers found that the average age of the comic book buyer at that time was around 30. This was a bit of a shock to comic book companies. To cope, they developed three strategies: they would (1) maintain their core market by hiring writers who crafted stories to appeal to the sophistication of a 20-40 year old reader rather than teens and preteens, (2) start new product lines designed to hook new readers with, for example, parallel versions of, say, Spider-Man in which Peter Parker is still in high school, and (3) launched many, many new series for 30-50 year old readers that tell stories that rival any in popular fiction, TV, or in the movies.

So while the number of readers shrank, and got (relatively) older, the writing got a lot better, and a lot more creative. Novelists and Hollywood screenwriters who grew up with comics were given the opportunity to write the characters they loved, and comic book companies gave them permission to “take off the leash” and write to fulfill the characters’ potentials. Other novelists and screenwriters wrote comics to tell the kinds of stories they could never tell in Hollywood.

This blog is meant to help break through the shell of that hard core fan problem, and show you where the really good stuff is to start with. What I’ve put together on Pinterest just scratches the surface. The staff of a local comic shop can put any of these comics in your hands, and show you even more great stuff.

Why do superheroes wear tights and capes? Why are the outfits so skimpy?

This takes a bit of explaining, and I’m going to oversimplify to get these points across.

Think about Superman’s costume, Batman’s costume, and Wonder Woman’s costume. Those characters were created between 1935 and 1945. They were meant to be men and women of action!, so the costumes are based on those of men and women of action of the 1930s and 1940s. Superman’s costume was originally based on that of a circus strongman. Wonder Woman’s was sort of based on the costume of a trapeze artist. Their costumes were meant to be very flashy and exciting and glamorous and, yes, a little sexy. Batman’s costume was based more on the film noir movies of the times – about dark avengers who skulked about in the shadows scaring the wits out of criminals. Batman was meant to be a scary character, so his costume made him look like a monster in the shadows, like he could be mistaken for Dracula or a 1930s horror creature from a black and white movie.

Those costume conventions stuck and became clichés as those three characters became instant hits back in the 1930s and 1940s. So new superheroes wore tights like circus-strongman Superman, or dark cloaks and scary masks like Batman, or skimpy trapeze outfits like Wonder Woman. The result over time was that the costumes became more daring and, frankly, more ridiculous and sexualized.

Now, over the past ten years, some of the hard core fan base (and the writers and artists themselves) concluded that that degree of sexualization had become absurd and disrespectful, particularly of the female characters, and are moving toward fixing this problem. Mainstream superhero comics are still kind of bringing up the rear in this effort, but they’re improving. Nowadays, superheroines are often very strong, intelligent, admirable women (sometimes they even lead teams of superheroes) but gadzooks a lot of the time their costumes are still just… ridiculous.

On the Pinterest boards I’ve put together, I’ve tried to weed out some of the oversexualized nonsense, but since many comics are written for an older readership to begin with, sex and sexiness are legitimate aspects of some stories, especially in the crime and spy series. And some series like Conan the Barbarian and Danger Girl (which turns sexy Bond Girl types into Indiana Jones and James Bond types) are daring by the nature of their stories – they’re fantasies. So understand… superhero costumes are still a work in progress.