The Comics Reporter is the one comix newsblog I read daily, both for roughly keeping up with what’s happening in American comics as because Tom Spurgeon is one of the people whose tastes I trust and have ever since we were both on the old Comix-L e-mail list. This month he has been looking back three decades to what he was reading in the eighties, as a teenager.
I myself only came to comics slightly later, from about 1987 or so and much of what he talked about I only know from reading about it in Amazing Heroes, comics Scene or Comics Interview, scouring the back issue bins in local comics shops and at local cons all during the nineties and of course from ads in other comics. Love & Rockets especially, the quintessential eighties comic, but I only know it from ads in other comics.
Hard to imagine these days, when we’ve long become accustomed to the idea that anything even halfway decent will be collected eventually, while it’s easier to just list the classic comics anf newspaper strips that haven’t been reprinted yet. But who would’ve thought even ten years ago, let alone thirty, that Fantagraphics would one day be better known as a publisher of high quality archival comics reprint projects than of avant garde alternative comix?
In the eighties and long through the nineties, trade collections were the exception, not the rule and if something was collected, it rarely stayed in print long; except for Watchmen of course. Which mean that the back issue bins were the only way to get any issues or series you missed and it was easier to read about a series like Reid Fleming than actually find it. You had to take what you could get and bugger proper reading order.
Tom’s series of reminiscences are interesting not just as excercises in nostalgia, or as a quick rundown of the better comics of the eighties, but as a contrast to the current state of the medium, in how we talked about them, bought them and looked at them. The traditional weekly comic shop ritual of getting the latest floppies is dying, comics have become more like books, something you buy online or in a general bookstore rather than in a specialised shop. There are good and bad sides to this, but it’s good to see it put into context every now and again.
Tom Spurgeon’s list so far:
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