Day: April 23, 2020

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

No Ellipsis Publishing

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, Poetics

There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as the brands attached rose to prominence. Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability. As a young comic fan, I preserved thousands of individual issues in longboxes, each comic wrapped in a mylar sleeve with a backing board to ensure they weren’t creased. A collection that provided a sense of pride, a bourgeoning curatorial instinct sending me through back issue bins to find issues I might have missed. As an adult, I prefer the issues collected in a different way, reading comics once the individual issues are bound up into trades and graphic novels, or