Most people have their little collections. At some point, I realized that preordering comics online is a lot cheaper than buying in the stores. For example, Discount Comic Book Service has a minimum of 40% off of everything. Unfortunately, instead of spending less money, I still spend about $100/month and simply end up with more comics. Last month, I snapped this picture of what was my current backlog. Usually, much of the stack is mine, but the top third was on loan.

I happen to enjoy helping people find media that interest them. I recommend movies, tv shows, books, comics, etc., but the hardest to convince people to try are comic books. I read a bunch of comic books every month (mostly buying online through DCBS) and as I read more comics I find that my tastes have expanded somewhat. These days, there are a lot of comic books in many different genres. To the extent that it should be possible to find comic books for just about everyone. In that vein, I’ve decided to start a series of posts about comic books for people that aren’t into superheroes. Not everyone will find all of these interesting, but I’m hoping to cover a wide array of books that I’ve thought were really good, many of which I’ve had a lot of success with getting friends to read.

This post is going to be about DMZ (Amazon). The general premise is that there an uprising of local anti-government militias across the country that has caused some pretty heavy divisions of the US. (On a side note, this has a lot of parallels to the tv show Jericho on CBS.) Manhattan has been turned into a DMZ with the inhabitants mostly just caught in the crossfire. For the rest of the country, there is a blackout of information about just what is happening there, so a journalist is sent in during a ceasefire. Pretty quickly, the situation goes to hell and the photographer is left there with no support.  With the gear he has left, the photographer has to figure out if he’s going to stay and try to shed some light on the situation or pack it up and go home.  His decision probably won’t surprise you, and as a result, we get to see some of the more interesting people that are still trying to make their homes there.  I can’t promise that you’ll enjoy it, but I can promise no superheroes.

You might need to be a comic book fan to appreciate this video at youtube. However, if you’ve ever thought that Civil War Re-Enactments are funny, you owe it to yourself to give this a look.

I don’t do a lot of comic book posts because I like my blog to be kind of relevant to most of my readers, so I hope that even people that don’t read comic books will find this interesting. The rest of you might just want to click the links.

Back when I started reading comics regularly enough to get into the history of the different publishers (back then, pretty much DC and Marvel with some random Dark Horse books thrown in for good measure). For DC, it was the era that was Post Crisis and around the same time as Legends. To put this into some kind of context, it was an era where creators were trying to make books more relevant to the times. For somebody like Superman, this meant restarting the comic book with an updated origin and a hip haircut. Longtime readers of the book were simply told that many Superman stories simply didn’t happen or happened in different ways that would be filled in later (this sort of thing falls under the umbrella of what is considered a “retcon” or “retroactive continuity”). For example, in the updated comic book reality, Superman’s powers come about from his being a kind of solar battery. It took most of his youth to store up enough energy to give him powers like flight, so there was never a Superboy. For me, none of this really mattered since I never read many of the stories that were now considered to have never really happened. On a kind of side note, there was recently an in depth article about the history of Superman and all of the different changes in his origin that was really interesting.

What people who don’t read comic books regularly might not realize is that with a few exceptions, the status quo is simply maintained across all of the major comics. People like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne simply don’t age. There are various exceptions, e.g. Peter Parker getting married to Mary Jane, Clark Kent marrying Lois Lane, 3 different Robins, etc., but by and large, everything stays the same and nobody ages. I thought about all of this recently in reading a column by Erik Larsen about this fact. His opinion is that there is always a new generation starting to read these stories and should they get stuck with characters like the son of Superman or should they get to experience the originals or some variation thereof. On a side note, Erik is the only person to write a long running title (Savage Dragon) that occurs in realtime so one year of issues covers one year of calendar time. Personally, I had never thought about the responsibility to preserve characters like Batman for the next generation.

I’m trying to get back to posting every day, so I’m starting to go through all of the articles that I’ve flagged for followup at some point. Polite Dissent, the same site that brought you the El Chupacabras page, brings you eSidekick. As a successful user of eHarmony, I thought it was really, really funny.