Sometimes all you want to do is to show off your cats, even slightly unsharp. Hector’s in the front, Sophie, who has adapted the broadband modem she’s sitting on as her latest comfort spot, is in the back. It doesn’t seem to harm the internet speeds, so I let her sleep on it. She seems to need those special places to feel safe, but every now and then she tries a new spot.
And that’s the second month of 2012 gone, with more books read: seven in total, five science fiction, two history. Need more diversity. I could’ve read more, but got bogged down in one book I didn’t finish, then was ill and disinclined to do anything but look at the telly for a week. I also only managed to review three of them in the month I read them, which isn’t that good either, but it seems I can do only a review a week or so, sometimes two. First world problems?
The End in Africa — Alan Moorehead
The third and final part of Alan Moorehead’s Africa trilogy, reporting on the war in North Africa in 1942-1943.
Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company — Wil O. Dijk
A very interesting, data intense look at an almost forgotten part of Dutch colonial and trading history.
Valor’s Choice — Tanya Huff
The first in a new to me series of military sf books, better than it needed to be.
White Dragon — Anne McCaffrey
The third Dragonriders of Pern novel which I’ve been rediscovering once Anne McCaffrey’s death last year remined me of them. Much better than I remembered.
The People’s Chef — Ruth Brandon
The biography of Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, something Sandra had been wanting me to read last year.
The Better Part of Valor — Tanya Huff
After I’d read the first in the series, I had to read its sequel too.
The Heart of Valor — Tanya Huff
And the third in the series too. All three were eminently readable and fun. What’s more there wasn’t any of the more nasty politics some mil-sf series have at their heart.
Osama — Lavie Tidhar
9/11 meets Life on Mars. A book stuffed with symbolism almost to the point of choking on it, but which just about worked despite or because of it.
L’il Abner, All Capp’s hillbilly humour/adventure comic strip was of course hugely popular for decades and hugely influencial on American popular culture. One of the things it popularised was Sadiw Hawkins Day, an annual day on which women of l’il Abner’s hillbilly town of Dogpatch got to propose to their men; the rest of the year they had to sit around and wait for their lazy and marriage afearing beaus to propose to them. Even on Sadie Hawkins day they still had to ketch them to actually be able to propose and All Capp managed to milk the pursuit of L’il Abner by his girlfriend Daisy Mae for decades before he eventually married them off.
Sadie Hawkins Day meanwhile had become popular outside the L’il Abner strip as well, merging with an older tradition of February 29th being the only day in the year that women could ask men out to dance, or marriage. That sort of topsy turvy craziness was hilarious back when gender roles were somewhat more strict than in modern times, but Sadie Hawkins day still is celebrated.
As my foster brother found out this morning. He has been living together with his partner for years now, they have two children together and while she would like to get married, he was in no hurry to do so. Which is why a few weeks back she took the matters into her own hands and asked my father for his hand, then surprised him this morning with a true old fashioned marriage proposal, having first collected several witnesses including his daughters and my mother, going down on one knee and popping the big question. He said yes of course; he’d better if he knew what was good for him.
So congratulations to the happy couple and I hope to get the wedding invitation soon.
Tom Spurgeon asks what we think will happen with the comics back issues market in the next few years or decades:
So what do you think? Is this even a market 10, 15, 25 years from now? Is it all digital? Does it shift to newer comics as more of those children try to recapture their past? Will people buy from the original run of DC New 52 comics in 2028? Will Jack Kirby comic books still appeal? What happens?
I think a lot of it will depend on what happens to the comic book format in general. To say it’s not in the best of health is an understatement and I can see it dying quickly once digital comics become fully accepted and every important publishers offers them. If that tie between the weekly batch of new comics and the necessary trip to the comics store is broken, that will inevitably mean fewer opportunities for the stores to sell back issues too. Especially once there’s a generation of comic book readers who’ve never known anything but cheap and easy availability of digital comics and who are happy to buy their back issues that way too.
Which would mean that most back issues will only be bought by a slowly shrinking base of aging consumers who have grown up with that way of buying comics, as arguable is already the case for new comics anyway. Which in turn means fewer comics stores, with those that survive having to specialise in something that makes them desirable for consumers who can get their normal comics fix through the internet. This is not a new development of course; just ask your local independent bookseller.
The upper segment of back issue sales, selling Golden Age, Silver Age and key Bronze Age and more modern comics can go two ways. It may develop further into a sort of pseudo arts market, with speculators and collectors both wanting to get the rarer, more exclusive comics, driving up prices on the usual suspects, with perhaps a lowering of prices for your run of the mill Golden or Silver age comic. But it may also go the way of the “normal” back issue market, as newer and younger collectors no longer see the point and value in getting them when they can get the stories either digital or in nice, luxurious hardcover collections.
In either case, there will also be a new market for these sort of back issue: the institutional collector, working for e.g. a dedicated comics museum, an university with a comics and sequential art department or even more general musea and universities wanting comics not so much for their intrisic value but for what they can say about a given period’s zeitgeist. For all these parties having the original comic can be as important if not more so than having the stories they contained; rule of thumb in any sort of academic research is always to go to the sources after all.
This is something that has happened to other once popular mass media. Way back in 1992 or so a columnist in the Comics Buyers Guide of all place dropped the example of the dime novel, hugely popular in the early twentieth century, having a resurge in the twenties and thirties as people started buying back issues for nostalgic reasons and once that audience died off, largely only of interest to the type of institutional collector I described above.
The biggest worry in all this, if we ignore the economic turmoil these developments will wreak on the already fragile comics industry is one that Tom touched upon as well, that certain comics will become genuinely rare once the market collapses, that there won’t be anybody who saves them and hence that we’ll be in danger of losing parts of our history. This is an even greater worry with digital formats. Paper is much more durable than silicon: even if the hardware remains usable, the software might not be, while data formats in particular are incredibly vulnerable to bitrot. Paper comics also don’t have any nasty digital rights management build in that prevents you from reselling them. Worse with some formats, your comic exists as long as their publisher keeps them alive in “the cloud”. Ironically, it might be the comics pirates who are our best bests in keeping these comics available after their publisher has given the ghost…