My Favorite Paper Relic: 100 Page Comics

The end is here. I was nestled inside my cave made of long boxes when I heard the air above screech like an owl. Leaning out the entrance I saw IT. IT had been looming for a while. IT had been orbiting my world, blocking out the sun, scaring the natives, and being a hot topic of conversation. Now IT was crashing towards me. IT is the digital revolution of my books. Not the revolution of all books, just me. I am talking about me. Stop making this about you. I don’t care what happens to your books. The way I am reading is changing, has changed and will change even more.

This has become very clear to me with the recent announcement from Amazon that they sold more digital books then paper books last year. There seems to be a lot of argument over whether that is actually true. Mr. Amazon once helped me when I had a flat tire so I am going to believe him. We have always been at war with East Asia.

I have never been a book fetishist. A book fetishist would be one of those people who go on and on about the virtues of the printed book. How the sound of pages flipping is an ancient whale song of one old soul seeking out another. The smell of the paper is a lifetime of regret, dreams and love mixed with timelessness of an old tree. That in the lowest points of your life you can go to your favorite book and it is like being spooned by a benevolent philosopher bear. I am not one to partake in that sort of hyperbole that makes you wonder if the speaker actually ever gets around to reading the damn thing. I have always dug having books around and I thought they looked kind of cool. I have even written about my love old newsprint on this very website!

Then a couple of life events started to alter my view of owning paper. First, I got married and got a Kindle as a wedding gift. I love my Kindle. I can read it everywhere that I read old fashioned books. It only needs to be charged about once a month. It is easy on the old reading eyes. Basically it had all the nuts and bolts of reading a book without the problems of paper.

The second event was my move across the country. Books are heavy. They are really heavy. Heavy enough to make you reconsider your long held belief that someone would be impressed by your extensive collection of second hand Hunter S. Thompson books. As you begin to fill boxes with books, and your long boxes are looming in a closet; paper begins to feel heavier than it already is. Between the kindle and my move I started to lose any great affection I had for paper. I loved the feelings, ideas, and words that were printed on the paper, but the romance with pulp was dead. This was especially true with comics. Oh god…comics.

The trap is that the comics that I really, really truly love are probably not going to get swept away in the digital wave. I couldn’t care less about owning paper copies of modern comics. The sooner I can ditch those the better. I am talking about the old junk. The weird old, hard to find books are still going to be weird, old and hard to find. My favorites are going to become weird relics that tell of a time before collector mania, the direct market, and computers. They are already way more special than massively overprinted event comics, and this uniqueness is only going to grow over time Take for instance, the DC 100 Page Super Spectaculars of the early 1970s. These are the most beloved of all my comics. There will be a day when I pass from this world. On that day those books will be locked into my crypt with me. They will provide all the entertainment I need in the next world.  They represent all the good and the bad of pre-modern age.

The 100 pager was format created to get  DC’s newly acquired characters into print for both legal and marketing reasons. These included the Fawcett characters like Captain Marvel and the Quality characters like Uncle Sam. They could be themed around horror or a single character but they usually had a mix of items within. A Flash 100 pager would have a reprint of a Jay Garrick story, then a reprint of a Johnny Quick story, then maybe a Max Mercury tale. It was a bit of a mixed bag. That is part of why they are cool. You have to imagine an era where it wasn’t easy to find a Golden Age Jay Garrick story to read. There weren’t archives, reprints, or torrents (ILLEGAL). You just knew those stories existed and when a reprint popped up it was like uncovering a dinosaur bone. (Seems odd for me to be explaining this since I wasn’t alive then, but if not me….WHO?) Readership turned over every couple years so many people may not have even read a Barry Allen story from 2 years ago. They were primer courses in a way.

That is a pretty romantic view from someone who didn’t actually have to be a fan during that time. It is easy to make the hunt sound awesome when you can order a pizza from your smart phone without having to talk to anyone. It is much easier to find what you want to read in the modern age, and that is great thing. The more time spent enjoying the work rather than pretending to enjoy the hunt; the more knowledgeable the fan base will be. More stories to read and they will be easier to find.

The digital apocalypse will mean that storytelling will change. Solicitations won’t be out two months ahead of time to rope stores into buying books. The traps of the physical object will fall away and we might just get closer to the content. It won’t be perfect and paper will always stick around, but there will be an evolution. Someday the concept of downloading a book to a tablet will seem antiquated and silly. People will bitch about how kids don’t appreciate the half second wait required to download a book. There will be a man in the future who loves his pdfs as much as I love my 100 pagers. I don’t feel any anger or resentment about the slow change. No one is coming to burn my comics.

When I think of comics, I think of those big reprint books.  There will probably be a day when I pop those out of a long box and try and explain to my robot nephew what a reprint is. It will anger him and he will seek to destroy all creativity. It has been written, it will be done. Now help me load these books into a rocket.

Tom Katers will send his 100 page comics to world where they can be an example. The Venusians are a capable of greatness, they just need to be shown the way.