Comic Books as Floppy Pamphlets or Graphic Novels: The Reader as Collector and Patron

I wonder if young kids buy comic books. The stapled pamphlet periodical comic books sold at comic book shops. At around five dollars for 24 pages, somehow it seems unlikely that’s where a kid would spend their money. My guess is they’d more likely encounter comic books these days as graphic novels in book stores and in school and county libraries. 

No doubt comic books are art and commerce born of printing techniques, books and newspapers, and as the technology to produce them changes so will their cost and consumption. 

It’s possible a shop somewhere has racks of old comic books where a kid could buy one for 25 cents. Or five for a dollar. That’s how I bought many of my first comics. Of course I didn’t know how comics had been distributed before the direct market. I only knew the comic book shop. I remember a story in the local paper about Emerald City Comics, profiling the guy who played soccer and opened a store to buy, trade, and sell comic books. Around 1980. I often went there with a friend in my neighborhood and I think that might’ve been because his mom was a nurse and we’d ride with her and she’d drop us off there while she went into the hospital across the street. He introduced me to Sgt. Rock and underground comics—his mom’s partner had a collection of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. We also drew together and I made a few pages of Super Hippy and His Dog Wonder Woof. If I remember correctly, my hero got his powers from a mix of drugs (accidentally?) consumed at a party. A punch bowl as I recall it now. I didn’t know how drugs worked, obviously. 

Sometime around middle school another friend—his mom worked for a distributor of periodicals and she’d bring home stacks of comic books, mostly DC—he and I traded comics. That’s how I got my issues of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew. I also collected the one with the superhero with flames coming out of his head, Firestorm, it was a DC comic. But notably, there were no comic books in my school library. No bound collections. At home my mom had a bound collection of early newspaper comics, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. That’s the only bound book of comics I remember from back then. School libraries certainly have comics now, some of them are among the most banned books in the United States.

It’s possible that buying comic books taps a collector instinct. When my nephew was five or so he was really into collecting rocks (gems!) and I assume collecting is instinct for us humans. Nuts, berries, small game. In a set of old movie cards they would include one with a checklist of all the available cards in the set. I made an effort! Toys also inspired my collector sensibility. I remember buying toys just to have them in my collection. Many thanks to the Oregon Bottle Bill. And much later, in art school and beyond, seeing pictures of famous artists with their collections, I thought that artists must have been collectors first and then creators: to expand and contribute to the collection. Otherwise, why would a creation take such a specific form?

So a young kid in the 21st century buying a stapled comic in a comic book shop would most likely be collecting them. Because to read comics, a library card is an amazing resource.