I would try to do what Charlton used to do. I'd pretty much ignore comics fandom, the way Archie Comics tends to do today. I'd try to focus on getting casual readers, particularly kids and people who don't want to follow lots of continued stories.

I wouldn't try to compete with DC and Marvel with their style of superhero/fantasy comics, because they already do that better than anyone else. (That would be like trying to compete against Archie's teen humor comics. Archie would win.)

I'd try to make my comics really cheap. There are lots of "dollar stores" around these days which sell all sorts of things for only a dollar. Some of them even have DVDs for a dollar each! I would try to put out some "Dollar Comics" to sell in such dollar stores. To keep costs down, perhaps the material within would be reprints of old 1950s public domain comics or foreign comics or taken from comic strips. I'd try to get the rights to put out comicbook versions of popular comic strips. In Australia, Frew has published a lot of vintage as well as brand-new Phantom comics; I'd try to reprint them for American audiences. There could even be an American version of the Beano (long-running U.K. series). A lot of the material would be considered "new" because it hasn't been seen before by most people in the U.S.

There could also be some new material, new comics made. I would focus on anthology titles with short stories by some of the old-timers as well as people just starting out who may have that traditional style. I'd let the creators own their own characters, have their own copyright, and would discourage a Marvel/DC-style assembly-line method of production where tasks are divided among different people. If it's an 8-page story, the artist might be able to pencil, ink, and letter it all himself, and might even prefer to do so, especially since he will own the artwork.

I'd start out small, just putting out some stuff in dollar stores and so on, beneath the radar of fandom until things got more successful.

I have thousands of comics that I haven't gotten around to reading.

I have tended to buy back issues in big stacks, which means that many of them get put away in boxes and never gotten around to. Twenty years ago, I made a trade with a friend where I got something like 300 random comics he had in exchange for two dozen of mine that he wanted. This lot included numerous issues of Marvel Two-in-One, Micronauts, Powerman/Iron Fist and other stuff that I never got the energy to plow through, even after so many years.

I guess it's just my collector mentality. For example, I have almost every issue of Master of Kung Fu but I've only gotten around to reading one or two issues of it. Sometimes I think about sitting down and reading them all, but I never get too far. I trust that they are good, though, and wish I had more time to enjoy them.

Sometimes I get enjoyment out of the essence of the thing rather than actually sitting down and reading it. I like having almost every issue of titles like Super-Villain Team-Up and The Champions even if I haven't read more than one or two issues of them. Perhaps if I read them, instead of looking at the covers, I'd be disappointed by them.

I have been making a solid effort to read every new comic (as opposed to back issues) that I buy. I have a "To Be Read" stack and a place on my bookshelf to put them after they've been read. Some comics keep sliding to the bottom of the pile, however, until I get in the right mood to read them. For instance, I buy Gemstone's Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse series every month, but I usually don't get around to reading them for a few months, and then I'll sit down and read three months' worth in a row. And that binge will make me want to read more of them, but somehow the next few issues end up on the bottom of my "To Be Read" pile again.

Sometimes I wonder if I should stop buying books because I won't have time to read them. Just mathmatically, there can't be enough years remaining in my lifetime to get them all read, which is a depressing thought.

But then the collector mentality takes over again and I'm surrounded by unread books that I probably won't have time to read. I recently let an eBay auction go, after it hit a certain price (although still a bargain at that price) because in the back of my mind I knew that I'd never get around to reading them if I did win the auction.

Nonetheless, I recently have been buying huge amounts of "Nick Carter" novels on eBay. Between 1986 and last month, I only had 13 of them. I fondly remember reading one of them in one sitting when I was home sick from school, back in the 1980s. Within the past month, though, I won a bunch of eBay auctions of them. So, now I have 99 of them, not counting duplicate copies. And I'm looking to complete the collection, get all 261 novels. But in the back of my mind, I know that there's no way that I'll ever get a chance to read them all, not even half of them, in the years I have left on this earth, knowing how slowly I get things read.

The very first comic I bought regularly was JLA, back around 1978. But then the kids on my block convinced me that Marvel was cooler and more "realistic," so I started buying Marvel instead. Then, around 1983, the kids on my block no longer really followed comics and I was getting tired of Marvel so I started trying other publishers, like DC, Red Circle/Archie Adventure and Charlton, as well as some of the more obscure Marvel titles that I'd ignored up till then like Conan and Doctor Strange. By 1986, Charlton and Archie Adventure were gone, and I became much more of a DC fan. I rarely went to comics shops back then, so most of my weekly purchases were made at the local Dairy Mart, where the choices were usually only Marvel or DC.

So despite having grown up a Marvel fan, during 1985-88 I was much more of a DC fan, and was trying to get friends to overcome their anti-DC prejudice and give "The New DC" a try. During that period, I looked upon Marvel as more boring and childish and factory-manufactured compared to DC. I also started buying alternative comics published by Eclipse (I have always preferred Eclipse to First for some reason), Renegade, and eventually (1988-90) Fantagraphics and Vortex. By 1989, I'd gotten tired of new mainstream comics and stopped buying them entirely. By the mid-1990s, I absolutely hated new mainstream comics.

In 1997, I started buying Avengers again because I heard George Perez was coming back as the artist, as he had been during the late 1970s when I first started buying it. This appealed to the nostalgic in me as well as appealing to my standards of what good comicbook art looks like. So, I started buying a mix of Marvel and DC as well as other companies. I didn't buy any CrossGen (aside from the Perez issues) until its final year or two when my shop gave me a deal on some Ruse issues and I started following more of that company's offerings.

When Quesada cancelled Byrne's X-Men: The Hidden Years and turned Capt America into a Marvel Knights title, I started to have some anti-Marvel feelings again and dropped a few titles (though not Avengers). I started to feel more pro-DC in reaction, but in recent months I've gotten to feel more pro-Marvel with their return of monthly letter pages and developments like putting Alan Davis on Uncanny X-Men and Tom Grummett on New Thunderbolts. I tend to follow my favorite creators around to whatever company they are at. So whereas, a couple years ago, I used to buy DC for my Grummett fix and Marvel for some Byrne, I now buy Marvel for Grummett and DC for Byrne. These days, Marvel seems more friendly to the old-timers like me than DC does, so I buy more Marvel than DC currently.

But I like occasionally buying another company's comics because it provides a different perspective, different company ads, different editorials, etc. If one gets bored with the standard Marvel format, one can always try DC's, or Dark Horse's or whoever.

I think we fans are in a way conditioned to buy Marvel and DC simply because they throw more sheer product on to the shelves than anybody else, and on a very regular basis. So, you can go to the comics shop every week and be sure to have your pick of new Marvel and DC releases. Whereas indie companies usually have longer waits between issues, especially now that many of them are putting out trade paperbacks instead of individual issues.

Okay, "R.I.P. Laugh" does seem like an odd juxtaposition of words. But my title refers to the cancellation of the long-running Laugh Digest Magazine, published by Archie Comics. The 200th issue of the digest appeared on grocery-store checkout aisles everywhere last week, marking the final issue of the publication. The title's replacement is a digest called Tales From Riverdale, whose first issue will appear next month. (There is also a new Jughead digest series on the way, meaning that collectors of such things will have two #1's this year for a format that rarely has a new #1 to buy.)

Laugh Digest was originally a companion to the regular Laugh anthology comicbook. Laugh began in 1946, the year that MLJ became Archie, dropping their emphasis on superhero comics in favor of teen humor like the Archie titles which had become popular.

During the run of the original Laugh, I think that I bought only one copy new off the rack, #393. Like Pep, it was an Archie comic that had history going back to the Golden Age, but by 1987 tastes were changing: long-running anthology titles were getting the axe in favor of character-specific titles, and publishers were renumbering for the sake of a new #1. Archie Comics was no different. In 1987, familiar titles like Archie & Me, Archie's Pals N' Gals (whose digest version still exists), and Pep were cancelled, with the titles for a short time being rotating features in the Archie Giant Series Magazine (until it, too, was cancelled). Titles such as Betty and Veronica, Jughead, and Laugh started over with new #1's. But while the other two re-numbered titles are still published today, the new Laugh ended its run after 29 issues.

The only thing carrying on the tradition of Laugh after that was the Laugh Digest, a slight connection to the Golden-Age and MLJ admittedly. Before last year, I'd only bought one copy of the Laugh Digest, back in 1984 when the Red Circle/Archie Adventure Series enticed me into giving the Archie humor titles a try. But as a rule I tend to stay away from the digests for some reason, even though they are probably the most visible and easily-found comics in America today, and they are better-looking now than they used to be. However, they don't run as many older (pre-1970s) stories as they used to.

A recent exception was Laugh Digest #197, which came out around Halloween last year, and which I thumbed through at the checkout line. I noticed that they had a little "Madhouse" section inside, consisting of 11 pages of reprints from that horror-humor comic of the 1960s. So, I bought my second Laugh Digest, twenty years after having bought my previous one. It's always nice to know that something is still going on, always around, even if you aren't actually buying it yourself. But now that feeling will soon go away. There will be no more "Laugh" logo to greet you at the checkout. The "Laugh" title that has adorned an Archie comic every year for nearly the past 60 years is finally being retired.

 

I'm 33 and mainly a fan of older comicbooks, although I do buy some new ones each month. I've been posting at CBR since early 1997. The boards I usually visit (usually once a day or more) are this one (Community), Classic Comics, and Music.

I've been reading and collecting comics since the late 1970s. It was around 1983 that I first began to try comics other than superheroes, and so I started buying titles by Archie/Red Circle, Charlton, etc. as well as old reprint titles like Marvel's Weird Wonder Tales. If you want to know what kind of comic I like best, check out THE FLY #5-8 (Archie, 1984) or THE BLACK HOOD #2 (Red Circle, 1983).

Around the same time, I learned about old-time radio (OTR) programs like The Shadow and Suspense. From 1992 to 1996, I published a fanzine called Tune In devoted to the topic. I've long thought about trying to put out another issue, but have never quite managed to do so. My enthusiasm for OTR waned in 1997, just as my interest in new comics (which I'd largely stopped buying in 1989) was reborn thanks to the internet and a local comics shop which heavily promoted the concept of pull lists and advance-orders through the Previews catalog. (I've been ordering out of Previews each and every month since April 1997.) Last year, my interest in OTR was reawakened a bit due to learning about shows being stored on CDs in MP3 format, so that one could buy many hours worth of programming for only a few bucks. I occasionally buy such CDs on eBay from dealers like rdalexander and otr_radio.

My all-time favorite TV show is the original B&W Twilight Zone. My favorite episode is probably "Walking Distance." I'm a fan of the old spooky radio shows, and the old spooky comics, so TZ is like a TV version of them for me.

My 2nd all-time favorite TV series is Doctor Who. My favorite Who stories are: "Spearhead from Space," "Terror of the Autons," "Robot," "Genesis of the Daleks," "The Seeds of Doom," and "Kinda."

The only current TV drama that I follow is CBC's This Is Wonderland starring Cara Pifko. I live close enough to Canada that I have grown up with a little exposure to Canadian TV and radio. I have always appreciated that different perspective being there on the dial.

These days when I watch TV, I tend to watch political talking-head shows like Hardball on MSNBC or The McLaughlin Group on PBS. I also like to read books about the history of the American Presidents. I think that I have all of Theodore White's "Making of the President" books, for example. The political websites that I visit the most often include Andrew Sullivan's blog, Townhall's columnists and WorldNetDaily.

My favorite movies are Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. I'm also interested in the old-time movie stars like Marlene Dietrich, and silent stars like Louise Brooks and Lillian Gish. TCM is one of my favorite TV channels.

My favorite prose writers tend to be old short story writers such as O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. My favorite comics creators are Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. My favorite DC character is Superman (including Superboy).

My favorite Marvel character is Captain America. (I have more issues of Cap than probably any other series, although I haven't bought it since the renumbering, nor the new Cap & Falc series. I'm particular about the art in comics. To me, Dan Jurgens & Bob Layton did the best Cap art since Mike Zeck in the 1980s, so when Marvel let them go to renumber Cap and go in a different direction, they let me go as a reader as well.)

My all-time favorite band is The Beatles. My favorite albums are: The White Album, Revolver, and Magical Mystery Tour in that order. My favorite Beatles songs are "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I am the Walrus" (tied for #1), "Penny Lane," "Eleanor Rigby," "Helter Skelter," and "Revolution 9" (I love it because it's so weird and different).

Bob Dylan is probably my all-time favorite solo artist. I love 1960s music; I love how it changed and grew from one end of the decade to the other, and how quickly the changes came (in comics, too -- from Dick Sprang's Batman to Neal Adams'). Last year, I got heavily interested in Simon & Garfunkel's 1960s output, when I bought a boxed set of all their albums. Last month, I bought The Who Sell Out from 1967 and have been enjoying its typical 1960s quirkiness and innovations. I love music that's catchy and quirky like that.

My favorite current style of music is contemporary Christian music (CCM) which I've promoted (and defended) many times on the boards in the interests of trying to share this neglected genre. My favorite CCM artists include Miss Angie, Kevin Max, Newsboys, and Rebecca St James. My favorite album of last year was Audio Adrenaline's Worldwide. The only other website that I check more often than CBR is CMCentral.

I'm a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination, whose official website can be found here. I became a Christian in August 1999, thanks in part to encountering articulate Christians on this very board (several format changes ago).

I'm a Democrat who voted for Howard Dean in the primary this year; originally I supported Gephardt but he dropped out before I could vote for him. In 2000, I voted for Al Gore. In 1992, the first year that I could vote, I voted for Bill Clinton. (I registered too late to vote in 1996 but would have voted for Clinton again.) I'm not sure who I will vote for in this election. Kerry doesn't excite me in the least, although he may help do so if he selects John Edwards or Gephardt for his VP. I have vaguely contemplated writing in Dean's name on the ballot in November.

Regarding political positions: I think abortion should remain legal; I favor affirmative action, animal rights, gun control, which are "liberal" positions. However, I'm personally "conservative" in my lifestyle: don't drink, smoke, swear, etc.

Well, that's my list of likes and so forth. Hope you weren't too bored.

P.S.: I previously posted here under the handle "Rimes."