Wednesday 4 April 2012

Next Men

I've been a comics fan all my conscious life - from being read to as a child (at a point I had memorised the entire Donald Duck Golden Helmet story) to spending relatively huge amounts of money every month buying comic books.

About 18-20 years ago I more or less gave it up. There were several reasons for this:

- I was a student and couldn't afford to spend almost my entire student loan on comic books any more.
- "Real life" caught up with me.
- I was tired of all the "collectible" gimmick covers and all the "grim and gritty"-ness of the day (in fact, the market collapsed shortly after I got out).
- The quality just wasn't there for the most part.
- Veteran Jim Shooter, who steered the mighty Marvel ship through some of its best ever days as editor-in-chief during the late 70s and early to mid-80s (and got fired...) had made me believe in a new golden age of comics with his hugely successful Valiant line. So of course he was fired again, and the quality of Valiant comics plummeted shortly thereafter.

So basically I was a bit fed up with the whole thing.

My love of the medium didn't go away, though. I kept picking up a few comics when they came my way, and would buy the odd trade paperback or the odd stack of comics when I happened upon a comics shop (living in Norway, that doesn't happen that often).

Last year, inspired by DC Comics' "New 52" gimmick, I decided to try to get back in the game again - this time trying to keep my purchases down to a stack I'm actually able to get through each month (my income may be considerably higher than it was 20 years ago, but so is the pile of bills, and I certainly don't have more spare time now than I did then), but I have a lot of catching up to do. Just yesterday I received my seventh monthly package since I started buying comics regularly again (courtesy of Midtown Comics, by the way - highly recommended).

Comics have changed in lots of way while I've been "gone", but that's a debate for another day (as is the subject of digital comics and reading comics on a tablet, by the way, but for the record I still prefer to read paper copies). One comics creator who doesn't seem to have changed a lot is John Byrne. For better or for worse, one might say, but that's also another discussion. :-) In any case, I've always found Byrne's books to be almost consistently entertaining, and often much better than a lot of other stuff that's been on the market at any given time.

I used to follow his "John Byrne's Next Men" series, and had gotten to around #20 when I abandoned ship. Last year I checked out what had happened to the series after I quit reading it, and discovered that John himself had jumped ship ten issues later, and had just resumed it, this time with IDW rather than Dark Horse Comics.

Of course, I had missed out on those last ten issues of the original series as well as the first nine-issue run of the IDW continuation, but I got in in time for the "Aftermath" (the second issue of which - #41 - has just come out). So I recently ordered a few back issues to fill in a couple of holes in my collection of the first twenty issues, as well as the "Classic Next Men Vol. 3" TPB which brings me up to the end of the original Dark Horse run, and am about to embark on a reading of that original run. By the time I'm finished with that, I hope that IDW will have collected the nine "pre-Aftermath" issues in a TPB too (only available in hardcover format at the time being, and back issues are already somewhat hard to get - and too expensive too). And by the time we get towards the end of "Aftermath", I hope to have caught up. ;-)

And at long last we're moving towards the point I wanted to make with this post:

One way in which comic books have obviously changed since the early 90s in in their production quality. While printing and colouring improvements had already began to happen by then, it's still a long strength from that to today's glossy paper and Photoshop (or whatever) colouring.

I'm not altogether sure I always like the present format that much. Sure, being more or less unlimited in what art or colour effects you may use enables you to create some really great stuff if you're so inclined. But in a lot of cases it seems like it's being used more to put a lot of bells and whistles on pedestrian quality work rather than actually creating anything good. In the "good old days" when your options were more limited, you had to work harder to make the best of the options you did have at your disposal. Those who did manage to work around those limitations often managed to create some really classic stuff that holds up as well today as it did then. Though I don't play video games a lot, I see the comparison: There's little problem in modern games, technically speaking, creating great graphics that run circles around the ancient games of the 80s and 90s. But what actually matters is the gameplay. I still prefer to play the original DOS version of  Civilization.

But all right, I shouldn't really complain about better colouring options. One thing I know I do not like, however, is the glossy paper. Glossy comic books used to be reserved for graphic novels (I'm not talking TPBs here, even though they're often mistakenly referred to as "graphic novels" these days) and special titles. It was all right for that, but seeing glossy paper on every title is really just distracting to me.

For that reason I was actually very pleased to see that the "Classic Next Men" TPB I received in the mail yesterday proudly featured matte paper - unlike every other comic book or TPB I've bought recently, and unlike even the present "Aftermath" series. I do understand that it's obviously an exception to the rule these days, but the matte paper alone to me promises a great read ("technically" speaking, at least, though I do suspect I'll be enjoying the actual contents as well).

If only I could convince comic book publishers to go back to printing their stuff on matte paper... and improving the general quality of their books... and their distribution... and the popularity of the comic book artform.

But I digress... sigh...