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Of the Comics Persuasion: Opening Salvo
By
Dan Horn
May 9, 2013 - 12:11
I've been away from
the Bin for quite a while, and I want to do something interesting for my latest reentry into
the arena of
comic book media.
I've been mulling over a few things since I went on hiatus, such as how what we do as "comics
journalists" is rife with quandaries: We spoil everything for our
readers and for ourselves, ensuring no one could ever truly be surprised
by something he/she has read; we give books we hate more coverage than the books we love; we put up previews of the first five pages of a comic. (Could you imagine if a film preview was only the first five minutes of the film?)
I don't know... Something isn't adding up here.
So, I'm going to try an approach that's a little different. I've been known as curmudgeonly in the
past, really laying into books that deserve a good laying into, but
I've come to realize something: negative press isn't negative press at
all. Rather, no press is negative press.
For instance, if I told you that Ten Grand #1 was the first dying wheeze of a last-generation comic
writer, reads like a comic book about a movie (Constantine maybe?) about a comic book, and is written in a narrative voice that reminds you of that really
annoying "friend" you have who thinks J.D. Robb's work is literary
fiction, would that keep you from buying it? Or how about if I said that
Scott Snyder's Batman is a humorless, meandering "epic" comprised of
impossible cliffhangers and equally and predictably impossible escapes?
It wouldn't matter, right?
Even if you could see that what I'm saying has some merit, and the enjoyment of a comic is entirely subjective anyway, we're all comic collectors as much as we are comic
readers. We've been programmed to pick up over a hundred books a year
that we'll never actually read. Hell, in my case it may even be
something like a thousand.
Ten Grand #1,
Jupiter's Legacy #1, and every issue of Snyder's Batman are collectible.
It doesn't matter whether there are better things to read; you're still
going to pick those books up. I'm just as guilty of this practice as
you. I love the character Batman, and, even if some of the
other Bat-family titles have grown so insufferable as to not even
warrant impulse buying, I still can't stop buying (and, admittedly,
reading) issues of the flagship Batman series.
It's
a problem. I get it. And I know that no problem, especially one as
pathological as compulsive collecting, is able to be solved very
easily.
So, I'm not going to try to solve it.
What
I am going to do is try to get you, fellow reader and therefore my
compatriot in this endeavor, to put a few more great books in your pull
list. Maybe the economic strain will finally force you to trim the
fat after a while, and you'll take a look at your pull list, as I once
did, and realize that there was a bunch of other garbage in there,
garbage that you were never going to read anyway.
So, every installment of this new editorial series, Of the Comics Persuasion, will highlight comics
deserving of your attention and deserving of your hard-earned cash. I
hope that this helps readers and creators get to where they ought to
be.
Last Updated: November 29, 2025 - 16:51
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