Living in the Past

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm starting to reread a bunch of comics from my youth (or even from before, which I collected years ago). And I'm going to try to blog about them as I go. I got a blogging app, Blogsy, for my iPad, which should make blogging on the go much easier.

 

Before I start posting those blogs, I wanted to set out sort of a mission statement. I'm not doing this because I think comics today suck, and the comics of my youth are great. There are good comics being published now, and there were crappy comics being published then.

However, the comics being published now aren't necessarily the same, in terms of style, as they were then, twenty to thirty years ago. This is even more evident in the superhero comics published by Marvel and DC, because they're the same characters, only now told with different voices.

I came to love superhero comics in the mid 80s because I loved the stories I was reading. To me, those stories are the definitive superhero stories. Batman by folks like Mike W. Barr, Trevor Von Eeden, Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, Doug Moench, Don Newton, and Alfredo Alcala is my Batman. There have been great Batman stories told since then, but the further away in style they get from what I first read, the less comfortable they feel to me. And what's the point of reading the same character for 20 or 30 years if it's not comfortable?

So this is my way of trying to explain why I may occasionally sound like the Grumpy Old Man. Please bear with me as we go along.

The thing is, sometimes, when I think about these old comics, I look online for blogs about them. And I almost never find any, probably because the Internet is a young person's game. But I love these old comics, and I want to share what I think about them. Maybe there's somebody else who feels the same, and is equally disappointed that nobody is talking about Bo Hampton's Lost Planet online. So I'm going to go ahead and talk about this stuff as I read it. I hope you join me for the journey.