As a kid growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s, we didn't have anything like the Marvel and DC movies we have now. I grew up in an era where the Hulk was a bodybuilder painted green, and this was what my Spiderman looked like:
I really only loved super heroes at this point and not comic books, because I was a little kid and couldn't read. I consumed all the other media though; Things like the toys, cartoons, and coloring books. Some of my earliest memories involve playing with these giant plastic superhero toys that didn't have movable arms while runing around my house in Underoos.
My introduction to actul comic books happened around first grade or so, when I somehow acquired a stack of comics, brand spanking new for 1984! There was everything from Spiderman and the X-men from Marvel, to Batman and the Titans from DC. I wore out that stack of books, pretty much teaching myself to read on those issues. I even still have a few - some of my most precious possessions from childhood!
When I got a few years older, a comic book shop opened up close to where I lived. Every time I saved up some money from my allowance or doing odd jobs, I begged my parents to take me down so I could buy new comics. Back then comics were like $.75 brand new, and with $5, I could get a handful of new issues. I quickly learned that I didn't have to wait a month for the next chapter in the adventure to arrive - I could go over to the back issues and buy stories that I had never read before. That was pretty much when I discovered that some of that older comics could get pretty expensive.
I kept on collecting comics through that late '80s and early '90s, and comics started getting more expensive. Instead of $.75 cents for a new issue, they became $1.00, then $1.50. There started being more and more titles crossing over with each other, so to get the whole story, I had to buy more and more books. I couldn't just read the Amazing Spiderman every month, I had to get Spectacular Spiderman, Web of Spiderman, and Spiderman too! It kinda got expensive.
As I got a little older comics became less and less important for me to buy every month. I started wanting to spend my money on things like music, cars, and girls. I got a job at a grocery store, and I would go over on my break and grab a few comics from the shelf and read them - so I was able to keep up pretty good with stories and the latest adventures.
The landscape of comics completely changed between when I acquired that stack of comics from 1984, and how comic books are now. Comic books ceased being a monthly periodical on cheap newsprint, and is now a slick and brightly colored magazine. Rather than being able to walk up to a newsstand or magazine rack and purchase a handful of issues for $5, single issue "floppies" cost $5.00 a pop now. In addition, rather than a popular title having a long run of uninterrupted issues, titles and characters are constantly being rebooted to cash in on collectors buying "first issues" and such. Plus, issues are constantly late, stories are going on hold for crossover events, and story-arcs are tailored for the "trades" - collections of issues in "graphic novel" format.
When I was in journalism school in college, I saw the internet as the future of publication, despite many of my instructors and professors taking the position that print journalism would never go away. They thought that people would always want to wake up and enjoy a coffee and a smoke while reading the newspaper, or that people would always have a magazine rack next to their toilet. They couldn't fathom that ever going away.
Comic books are part of that same landscape, although clearly a different art form. Somewhere along the line comic books got away from what they were created as - cheap and disposable entertainment - and became a "collectible" . Comics are no longer available at grocery stores, newsstands, or many of the other places they were available in the past. Now, comics are available at comic book shops, and at bookstores in trade paperback form. Monthly "floppies" are relatively expensive. Kids don't get comics the same way my generation did, but the companies publishing them still make them the same way.
At what point will the comic book publishers, most notably Marvel and DC, cease publishing monthly ongoing series, and instead just hire creative teams to create stand alone graphic novels? Ongoing monthly titles are clearly going the way of digital comics, and as services like Marvel Now become more popular, there will be a distinction between folks that read for the stories, and those that purchase as a collectible.
In the future, kids are going to discover super heroes the same way I did - thru other media besides comic books. I do not think comics will ever completely go away (just as books and magazines have not completely gone away), but just as kids discover new music and videos digitally, they are going to discover the art of comics digitally as well. Shouldn't the medium adjust to this?
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