Thought Bubbles: Trade-Waiting for Grant Morrison
(Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on April 8th, 2014.)
I’m about three months behind on reading new comics. I’m collecting a lot of books I’m really excited about right now, with concepts that I’m intrigued by or by creators whose work I consistently enjoy. But none of that has changed the fact that I’m about three months behind on reading new comics. There’s only one person to blame for that, and that person is Grant Morrison.
My current three month reading delay actually started a little over ten years ago, when a good friend of mine lent me the entirety of Grant Morrison’s 44-issue run on Doom Patrol (this was before all of it was collected into six matching trade paperbacks, or one ridiculously large hardcover). It was March 10th, 2004 when he gave me the books to read. I know that date specifically because we wrote it down. I am notoriously bad about borrowing books from people and then keeping them for extended periods of time without reading them. My friend knows this, and so he and I made a deal, only partly in jest, that I would have ten years from that date, until March 10th, 2014, to read those Doom Patrol comics. On that date I would have to return the books to him, regardless of whether I’d read them or not. ‘Piece of cake,’ I thought. ‘I want to read these. I’ll have them back to him in a few months.’ We wrote down the terms of the agreement, both signed it, and had a few witnesses sign as well. We all had a good laugh about how ridiculous it was.
You likely already see where this is going.
Those Doom Patrol comics traveled with me to two different cities, three different apartments, and ultimately my current house before I finally got around to reading them – with about three months left on the contract I’d signed. I read them in chunks of four or five issues at a time, and finished them with a week left on the agreement. Those are some absolutely fantastic comics, and you can see a lot of what Morrison has done later being developed in those pages. Particularly his tendency to fragment scenes and ideas, introducing them on one page and then putting them aside for multiple issues before coming back to them, is used to great effect in Doom Patrol.
It’s that technique in particular that I don’t think I would have appreciated as much if I had been reading the book month-to-month. Reading in chunks allowed me to retain more of the seemingly oddball pieces from previous issues as I advanced through the series, drawing connections that I would likely have missed otherwise. I’ve thought for years that Morrison’s work is best read in collected form, and this series cemented that position for me.
There was a time when being three months behind on reading comics would have driven me crazy, when I had to know as soon as I could what the latest adventure of The Flash or the JLA was going to be. Maybe it’s a result of the Netflix, watch-a-whole-season-in-one-weekend method of content consumption, but I find that a lot of the comics I’m reading currently are best enjoyed when binge-read. Nowhere Men, for example, is a comic that is so dense that I always forget parts of previous issues by the time the new ones come out, but when read all at once I’m sure not to miss anything (or at least to miss less than I would otherwise). I’ve only read the first two issues of Pretty Deadly as they came out, but I already know that’s a book I’m going to get more out of once I can read it in a chunk of four or five issues. There are relatively few books that I’ve read monthly even as worked my way through Doom Patrol – Sex Criminals, Afterlife with Archie, and Batman ‘66 come to mind (though the latter is weekly appointment reading). The rest, I’m fine to let pile up. I’m buying the single issues as a way to support the titles, but I’m essentially trade-waiting those series.
I don’t think I’m the only one who finds it interesting how reading habits change over time, It’s pretty clear that the publishers themselves are interested in it. When I was a kid, trade paperbacks were reserved for only the most special or important of stories. The first one I ever owned was a now-tattered collection of Batman: A Death in the Family that still resides on my shelf, and I remember seeing huge stacks of that and The Death of Superman at the grocery store. Now it’s pretty much a given that every six issues of a series is going to be collected into a trade paperback at some point or another. The bookstore market has definitely necessitated that trend, but perhaps it’s also just a logical progression – as the readership ages, habits change, and more people with memories as bad as mine find themselves trade-waiting books they would once have consumed monthly.
Whatever the reasons, the fact remains: I’ve still got about three months’ worth of comics to catch up on. And I couldn’t be happier about it. Thanks again, Grant Morrison.