Month: July 2018

buying comic books is complicated

For the last couple of years, I’ve been visiting my local comic book store once a week and picking up a few books. I started doing this around the same time DC’s Rebirth started, in 2016. I was originally looking at it as an experiment to see if I could get back into buying and reading regular superhero comics again, after a fairly long break. Well, I found a few books I liked and I stuck with it for quite a while. A few things happened recently that got me thinking about whether or not I wanted to stick with it though. Some changes in creative teams on the books and stuff like that.

I thought about jumping off the “weekly comic store visit” bandwagon in January 2017, and wrote a lengthy blog post about that, but I decided to keep going to the local store, and I stuck with most of the books I was reading. Well, I’ve now somehow managed to talk myself into switching back to getting my comics from Westfield Comics again. I placed an order with them today, for comics coming out in August and September. Maybe switching to Westfield will cause me to spend more money on comics, or maybe it’ll be less money. (Placing just one order per month, and seeing the total for the month all at once, might lead me to manage my comic book budget a little better.)

My plan is to stick with Westfield until the end of the year, then reevaluate. I might then give up entirely on monthly books again, or switch to just getting stuff digitally from Comixology, or go back to the local store. I don’t know. The thing I need to watch out for is my tendency to build up a ridiculous backlog. I think I should set a rule that if the pile of unread comics gets taller than me again, I need to stop buying them altogether.

SDCC day one

As I said in yesterday’s post, I am not at SDCC. But I am following the news. Or at least some of the news. So here’s a post with links to a few things I found interesting today.

Spotlight on Maggie Thompson panel: The panel I would most like to have attended today. I was a long-time subscriber and reader of CBG, and it’s nice to see Maggie get a spotlight panel. I learned a lot about comics (and a bunch of other stuff) from Maggie and Don Thompson, and I really miss CBG. (The linked article from The Beat is a little… off. I get the feeling that maybe it was written in a rush, at the back of the panel room, and uploaded to the site without any editing. Oh well. This is one of the reasons I miss CBG so much: well-written and well-edited articles!)

The Comics Journal returns to print: Not exactly SDCC news, but related, and probably timed to coincide with SDCC. I never subscribed to The Comics Journal, but I did pick up a number of issues, back when it was a regular monthly magazine. TCJ always seemed a little too self-important and serious to me, but they ran some great interviews and articles. The new print magazine will only be coming out twice a year, though, so it’s not going to be quite the same as it was in its heyday. But it’s still a welcome return.

Doctor Who Series 11 Trailer: Yeah, I’m looking forward to this! The Doctor Who panel today would be my second choice for “panel I would most like to have attended.”

DC Universe streaming service: I’m curious about this, but not sure I want to pay $8 per month for it. The Titans trailer is… interesting. I’m not sure what to think about it really. It could be a great show or it could be a train wreck. Hard to tell. You can pre-order a one-year membership for $75 right now, but I’m not sure I’d do that without having more of a clue about the new shows.

Grant Morrison on Green Lantern: This is a book I’m going to want to read.

Not at SDCC, preview night edition

Once again, I’m not at SDCC. Sigh. Tonight is preview night, and there are a few things going on, but maybe nothing too exciting (to me, at least). I see that they’re actually closing Harbor Drive during the con this year, which has got to be a pretty big deal. (They probably should have started doing that a few years ago, honestly.)

I’ll be keeping an eye on the news from San Diego during the con. There’s usually some interesting and fun stuff, and I could really use a break from serious news right now. The Union-Tribune has a landing page up with links to all of their con coverage. The local coverage of the con is usually pretty interesting. (They even have an article up about recreational marijuana use for con attendees! Pair that with the free Taco Bell, and you’re all set.)

I’ll probably also be spending some money over at Comixology this weekend. They generally have some pretty good sales going on during the con.

Email Newsletters (and the ever-present backlog)

I’ve blogged in the past about the ways in which I’m trying to shape my news/information consumption. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is get more info from email newsletters and less from randomly dipping into the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit fire hose. I have a “read/review” folder in my email where these newsletters get filed (based on some rules). Then, in theory, I read them. In practice, I’ve usually got about 400 emails in that folder, unread. I dip into it on weekends and read some stuff, but I never really catch up.

I discovered something interesting this weekend, so I thought I’d write it up. I subscribe to several newsletters from the NY Times. One of them is their “NY Today” newsletter, which has news and information for stuff related to NY (and sometimes NJ), daily. My current backlog has me reading stuff from April right now, so a lot of stuff in that newsletter isn’t too useful. But, on Friday, I wanted to check some stuff about what was going on in NYC this weekend so I thought I’d open up the current one and read it. When I went to the top of the read/review folder, I couldn’t find it, or any other NY Times newsletters. (And I checked my spam folder, and they weren’t in there either.) It turns out that I stopped receiving all of them in early June. I went to my subscription page, and I showed as still subscribed to everything. So I decided to fire off an email to customer support. I didn’t really expect much from that, but I figured that, as a paying subscriber, maybe they’d get back to me with something useful. Well, surprisingly, they did. It turns out that, apparently, if you’re not actively clicking links in the email newsletters, their system automatically stops sending them to you at some point. I’m a little unclear about how that actually works. The way they phrased it, it sounded like you’d be dropped if you haven’t clicked a link in a newsletter in the past 90 days. But I’ve clicked plenty of links within the last 90 days, though they were mostly in newsletters that were more than 90 days old. So maybe you need to have clicked a link within the last 90 days, in a newsletter that’s less than 90 days old?

Anyway, I found that interesting. I resubscribed to a couple of newsletters, so the backlog will start building up again, but I’m not going to resubscribe to everything I’d previously subscribed to. For one thing, their system requires me to go through that annoying reCAPTCHA “prove you’re human” stuff every time I subscribe to a newsletter. And that’s gotten more and more onerous lately. I’ve notice that it’s less annoying if I do it while not connected to VPN. (I guess that using a VPN makes me more likely to be a robot?)

I really think that the Times should hook their “paying subscriber” info into their newsletter system and just let the fact that I’m giving them money every month be enough evidence that I’m human. (And maybe also exempt me from that 90-day timeout thing.)

This has all got me thinking about news consumption in general again, and maybe tweaking things a little more. But that should probably be a subject for another blog post, on another day, since I think I’ve wasted enough time on this stuff today. I should go outside and get some fresh air.