I've always loved comics. As I got older, and the typical teenage interests of girls and guitars superseded my love of comics, I lost track of the medium. I'm just the kind of person that marketing gimmicks like series reboots are made for-- and as such, I am in the process of getting a few of the #1s that DC is releasing this month. I don't know how sensible of a move it is. I mean how many people are like me, and enjoy gateways into old series via reboots? I'm guessing not a lot. I suppose DC is guessing differently. I hope they do well. I'll enjoy the new issues. Especially since I have the perfect comic viewing platform, my iPad.
In most ways I was always a Luddite. It was a peculiar dogma, and it meant a lot to me for a short period of my life. I never would have thought of comics on anything other than newsprint. I even preferred the older newsprint, four color comics over the glossier versions that came out in my teens. In hindsight, I think that was as much about a nostalgia for years gone by as it was a real aesthetic appreciation. As I've written here recently, I have an amazingly unhealthy anachronistic streak. Comics were a part of that.
I'll read the DC reboot on my iPad. I already read older comics, the newspaper strips, and a few webcomics on my iPad. I guess my Luddite side has lost out. Or been buried... it'll resurface during my much anticipated (by me) crotchety old man phase. (Scheduled to begin at age 45. I'm getting in early.)
I think the disappearance of my anti-technology tendencies is related to my general distaste for ideological positions as I grow. I have no more patience for abstracts ruling my life. At 15, I was excited by the TRUTH that I could KNOW... At 25 I felt obligated to pursue the ideas that had meaning to me. At 35... I am happy to make an effort to be a decent person, to follow my hear, as cliched as it sounds. I'm less concerned with abstractions as truth, and more interested in just living my life. Perhaps crotchety old man me will be back to living my life out of a pamphlet. More likely I'll find everything highly ridiculous and amusing, like a Vonnegut caricature.
It would be supremely silly and awesome if I grow up to live my life as an abstraction in an effort to avoid being an abstraction. I would appreciate that. Probably even find it wryly amusing.
Regardless, the new comics will be fun. Hopefully they will include less training montages of people in tiny underpants. I'll be fine if they do. I'd hate to be dogmatic about it.
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