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THAT'S the harm.

In the past few decades we have seen comics transformed from disposable reading material into "collectibles", and the very manner in which they are "collected" has worked more and more against the notion that they are created to be READ -- until, of course, we reach a point where many of them are NOT.

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Which would not be a bad thing. In fact, the industry as a whole would probably be a good deal more healthy if the "collector" and "speculator" mentalities had not come to play such an important role.

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Essentially they are the same thing.

True, American comics -- superhero comics, in this case -- started addressing more "mature" themes quite a few years before the speculators began to make their presence felt as a driving force behind the sales of certain books. And, also true it was in some part the attention in the Real World Media that such "mature" material got (I'm thinking specifically here of the seemingly endless coverage, at the time, of Denny and Neal's GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW) that drew the early speculators to what they perceived as "hot" books (not a term much in use at the beginning).

But the shift to the Direct Sales Market, which was motivated entirely by the profit margin, worked a dramatic change on the industry -- we effectively slammed the door in the faces of our whole entry level audience, and with that came more and more product targeted for the people who seemed to have to most money and the least sense, the speculators. When the balloon burst in the early Nineties, it was because the greater part of the product had been turned over to the speculator market. The regular reader, especially the younger reader, had been completely abandoned.

A vicious circle, I suppose -- or, given the ultimate fate of the industry, perhaps something more akin to a vicious spiral!

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I'm a reader first and a collector second. I can still enjoy my comics and not treat them like garbage. There's always been something neat to me about pullng a comic out to read that's 30 years old that I bought as a kid and it still looks like it just came off the rack.

Casey

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Why is that an either/or?

It's not. That didn't come out the way I intended, my apologies.

Casey