Are you a completist?

The owner of a comics store in Illinois I once frequented use to compare comic book fans to drug addicts. Like an addict we’ll follow a book for years after whatever storyline, writer, or character first attracted us to the book has left. We’ll bitch and moan about the product, but that doesn’t stop us from craving our latest fix. When I come to think about it there are about a half-dozen to a dozen titles (DC and Marvel) that I could drop and I don’t think I’d miss them. I buy them because I want to see everything that going on in a particular Universe or Franchise rather than any particular interest in the specific storyline or creative team. More the fool me I know, but I never seem to get around to pruning them out of my pull list.

I was just reading Checkmate #30 by Bruce Jones. It’s a fine issue, the writing is okay, the characters are recognizable, the art is great, but somewhere along the line I was left with the feeling that it wasn’t written by Greg Rucka. That’s not meant to be an indictment against Bruce Jones, he is a very capable writer, but the modern Checkmate was/is a very specialised comic. It was brilliant under Greg Rucka’s tenure and suited his strengths, but I don’t think there are that many writers who are suitable to follow him. It was too much like Manhunter where the interest, at least for me, was in a specific writer, with a particular voice, applied to a particular niche. A different writer in that niche never reads right.

The extreme examples are Robinson’s Starman or Gaiman’s Sandman which are cases where the management acknowledges the implicit draw of the writer and cancels the book when he leaves. However, there are other cases where the financial draw or the sense of corporate ownership is too great and new writers are called in to prolong the product. This is ultimately how we arrive at non-Siegel and Shuster Superman or non-Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. However, it doesn’t always work that way. Just look at the books like Hawkman or Teen Titans that Geoff Johns has resurrected, but are then never quite as good again after he leaves.

I should have dropped Checkmate, Hawkman, and Teen Titans when the creative teams that drew me in left, but I just kept trucking along. I will admit that it occasionally pays off (Peter Tomasi on Nightwing is fantastic), but that feels like its getting rarer and rarer. I sometimes wonder how much of the comics industry is supported by guys like me who buy books just because they’re collectors of a series (the aim is collect all the issues) rather than fans (who are fanatical about the book). We started out as pure comicbook fans, but somewhere along the line we became completists. Really and truly we should be the aberrant minority, but I have a sinking feeling that we may be the only people left.