10 Harsh Truths You Don't Want To Admit About Comic Books‏

8. A Lot Of Them Are Total Garbage

The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen are just two of the paragons of the superhero comic book genre which we hold up in defense of those aforementioned straw man snobs who otherwise dismiss comics out of hand. Which is a good argument, and a fair one, but it also overlooks another key thing about comic books: most of them aren't as good as The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen. Which is fair enough, because those are a couple of indisputable classics, and rarely does anything come close to touching them. But most comics don't just miss those heights, they're nowhere near them. They're...kinda crappy and forgettable. Again, that's almost a prerequisite of the comic book. Before the idea of collecting acrs into trade paperbacks was ever floated, single issues were designed to be as disposable as they were usually treated, chucked in the trash as soon as you were done with them, just like the newspaper (this is the olden days, so they didn't have recycling, chill out Al Gore). Even today, when the market for collected editions is almost as big as it is for single issues, that transitive quality lives on thanks to punishing deadlines which means story and art are often produced under duress, meaning you're never going to get the same quality in a comic book as you would, say, a movie or book that's been revised and laboured over for years. Think about your latest batch of comics picked up from your local store, or downloaded onto Comixology. How many of those single issues really stood out to you? How many will you remember in a few months' time, without re-reading them? Maybe one or two, if you're lucky. And then look around the shop/app and see how many other single issues came out that month. How come you're not reading them? Because most monthly superhero comics aren't masterpieces. Most of them are thoroughly average, and a lot of them don't even manage that. Yet we keep reading them out of a sort of brand loyalty, or because they've always had our support; like a football team, you stay with a title through the rough patches and the smooth. And you hope that, amidst all the rubbish, you'll come across some real gems. It's just tough to admit that, most of the time, we're reading what are decidedly not gems.