The Weekly Crisis recently invited 5 comics bloggers to write about why they buy the comics that they do, then turned it over to ask the readership the same question. This is an extended version of my response to that post.

For most of my comics-reading life, I’ve followed characters. I’d pick up The New Teen Titans and stick with it. I’d follow that to Flash (and that to Justice League Europe), Hawk and Dove, Deathstroke, Nightwing, etc.

Sometimes I would pick up a new book for the concept. I’d take a look at, say, Darkstars in the early 1990s, and think, “Hey, that sounds cool!” Or Planetary back in 1999, or Welcome to Tranquility last fall (yeah, in trades).

I’ve also tended to stick with the universe I know best — DC — and stand-alone titles. The Marvel books I’ve read tend to be either creator-owned (Groo the Wanderer when it was published at Epic), licensed (Transformers when I was younger), or off in their own little corner (Alias, The Twelve). Same with WildStorm — while I eventually tracked down some Stormwatch and Authority trades, mostly I read Planetary, which was off doing its own thing.

For a long time, I read most of the big events at DC. Partly it was because everyone was in them (and I was reading a lot more super-heroes back then), and partly it was because, if Big Changes were afoot, I wanted to see what happened. Though I drew the line at tie-in issues of series I didn’t read, unless they specifically crossed over with a book I was reading. (The one exception: DC One Million. I read almost all of those tie-ins because I wanted to see what DC did with the ideas.) Eventually I got tired of the endless crossovers of the 1990s, and stopped. Until Infinite Crisis, which looked interesting, but annoyed me even more in the end.

These days, I find myself following writers. Astonishing X-Men was far from my first comic, but it was my first X-Men comic — not counting the crossover with New Teen Titans back in the 1980s — and I picked it up because it was Joss Whedon. I’ll check out almost anything mystical written by Bill Willingham. Neil Gaiman’s name got me to pick up his Eternals miniseries, and you can bet I’ll pick up his Batman story next year. And I’m beginning to get to that point with Jay Faerber — Noble Causes, Firebirds and Dynamo 5 are hard to beat, and I resisted picking up Gemini, but finally gave in.

Like some of the respondents, I also have trouble letting go. I kept reading various incarnations of Titans for over a decade (everything from “Titans Hunt” to Infinite Crisis, minus the Jurgens series) even though I no longer really liked the book — just occasional stories. I kept hoping it would get better, but after being bitten over and over, I finally wised up and walked away.

I’ve gotten much better at only reading the stuff I actually like lately (Countdown to Final Crisis excepted; it was research material). I dropped Fell after a few issues because, as good as it was, it just disturbed the heck out of me. I gave Shadowpact and Jack of Fables a shot, but neither really grabbed me the way Fables did. I even came close to dropping Flash with the 2006 relaunch, though I decided to give it a chance. Once I picked it up, I stuck with it because the writers were clearly learning on the job (and you could see that they were learning from issue to issue), and then actually liked the next writer’s arc — not where it went, but how it was presented.

Looking at books I’ve started reading recently: Continue reading →