The Digital Movement - Part 4

Here's my final point to a digital comics movement.

Point 6 -

Death to the investors.

I got into comics just before it began its horrid transformation into a collectible and an investment.  I watched in bitter disgust as those with expendable income turned to buying comic books with the sole intent of storing them away as items of investment.  This must have been the same swarm of flies that raped and pillaged the sports card hobby.

To everyone who every invested money into comic books with the sole intent of selling them later for a massive profit, I, and I say this with all the sincerely I can muster - I hope you lost money!!!!  I hope you lost lots of money for giving the comic book publishers a false sense of value.  Because of the obnoxious investing of comic books, the publishers looked for any reason to start new titles and offer that ever so valuable issue number 1.  

Sadly, the comic collector and hobbyist were wise to the Investors.  Everyone was buying the first issue of every new title.  And not just one copy, but many copies.  All with the expectation that each comic book was going to be $100 or more in the future.  The result of over-buying, over-selling and hoarding for investments caused these issues to be worthless.

In the end, I witnessed greedy and bloated publishers, barely able to support their own gorged weight, collapse to the ground and the investors dumped their now worthless books on the market, leaving the entire comic book industry a broken and tattered mess.

Before the comic industry dumped in its own shorts, I stopped collecting.  The quality of comics had dropped so low that grade school kids couple produce better stories and better art.  I'd come back every couple months and look at the new books, and honestly, it wasn't getting better.  Months turned into years, and the comic industry had recovered and was actually producing decent material.  The art, for many books, was excellent, and in some cases, much better than when I actively collected.  But, the cover price had increased, yet again.  The chain reaction of investors to publishers to the end customer (me) was too much.  The memories of the greed were so still engraved in my brain.  

But, by this time, I had discovered GIT Corp, and digitally scanned PDF versions of comic books.  There is no comic that could seduce me back to the printed realm of comic books.  I am pure digital now.  I'm sure hard-core vinyl record lovers fought against Compact Discs, but look how that ended.  From CD's we evolved to MP3's.  Digital music.

Its a digital world.  It will bring comic books into its fold.

In the 5th and final part of the Digital Movement, I will bring my soapbox and declare what is good and righteous about comics in digital format.