It’s not much of a secret that basically all new comics are out there in the ether in digital form within a day or two of hitting the stands, and it’s not terribly hard to dig up a lot of older comics, too […]
I worked in a comic book store in the mid-’80s and loathed the customers who came up to the counter with their own plastic bags and acid-free cardboard backing boards to begin the process of preserving their investments right away.
New mainstream comics about anything other than superheroes aren’t entirely obsolete, but they’re definitely anomalies; if there are three war comics running at the same time, it’s like some kind of harmonic convergence.
There is no way of getting around it: if you are going to look honestly at American comics, you are going to encounter superheroes.
Unsurprisingly, the maleness of comics culture has been self-perpetuating: if reading (or collecting) comics is understood as “something that guys do,” then the woman in the comics store is an anomaly.
The language of comics criticism is still young and scrawny — it’s so underdeveloped that there’s no good adjective that means “comics-ish”.