Okay so that was the Bruton family weekend, but whilst Louise and Molly headed for the delights of Cadburyland I stayed in Birmingham and did the comic thing.
Off to Nostalgia & Comics which is most of the way through a refit. The store looks partly fantastic and partly looking like a small bomb has hit. Stock everywhere as you might expect with the new shelving just installed, but once it gets onto the gorgeous new bookcase shelving it's going to be fantastic. At some point I'll get a series of pictures together and post the before and afters.
In one way I'm ridiculously jealous. For years and years and years I'd been saying that the shop needed bookcase shelving and only now, when I'm gone, does it finally happen. This is not fair. I actually spent a few minutes between chatting and waiting for Dave to get some lunch tidying and sorting a couple of sections and it's so amazingly easy. Not fair at all.
One thing I did do when I was perusing the shelves was pick up a few current superhero comics to see what I may have been missing. I figured it had been a while since I read any superhero stuff and maybe I should see what's out there. And I flicked through them, trying to keep an open mind about it all. But to no avail. Everything I picked up, all the big name books, had so much going on, som much backstory and so little points of entry for poor folks like me that I had to admit defeat.
Later on, when I had a moment to process some of the weekend I got aroundd to thinking about he reasons that I've sort of fallen out of favour with superheroes or maybe why superheroes have fallen out of favour with me.
And I'm beginning to develop the germ of an idea tying together comics, classic characters such as Spider-Man, Batman, The X-Men and classic pop music of my youth and today. Nothing concrete yet, but something that I will be doing later in the week. Oh, I bet y'all can't wait.
I read Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men and quite enjoyed that, but only because the line-up wasn't significantly different from the Claremont/Byrne stories of the early '80s.
ReplyDeleteMost superhero comics nowadays hardly invite new readers in, as you say. Are any new readers coming to these titles, or are Marvel and DC just keeping them going until the existing readership die out?
When my godson broke his wrists (falling from a tyre swing in the woods) I got him the Ditko Spider-Man book. Okay, maybe not the ideal present in those circumstances as it's as heavy as a paving slab, but Inigo enjoyed it. So I think it's the stories that have gone all strident and unwelcoming and awfully po-faced - those early adventures still have the power to engage a 10-year-old's imagination.