COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 308
So last week you may have noticed (or just as likely didn't) that there was no column from me. I don't think I'm all that important for it to matter much, except that I really do try to have a column ready every week, if only to show some consistency. Sometimes I forget because I'm busy with school or whatever, but last week I didn't write because I couldn't. My computer committed suicide (yet again), leaving me unable to do any of my planned work for the day. I finally got access to a computer, as you can see, but had other things to take care of. Like homework.
Finding myself without my nightly excursions into the creepy infocracy that is the web, I needed to find other diversions. I've been playing my Playstation. And reading comics.
I hadn't been to a store in a month, for me that is like a millennia. Oddly enough, I only bought two comics. Five dollars total. I'm not sure if this new stinginess is because I need to save up for a new computer or because not much interests me. Perhaps a little of both. I suppose it's tired for me to say how I don't feel the same passion anymore, or that I can't afford to, and I'm sorry. But that's just the way it is. I suppose being perpetually broke and busy is all part of the college experience. As is experiencing new things. I think I now have the attention span of a gnat.
Which I suppose is why the computer suited me so much, and why I miss it so now. It's a part of my daily ritual, whether it's checking my mail when I first get up or signing on after prime-time to read web comics and news sites. Last week as I was doing this the system just shut off, almost mocking my newfound dependency.
Even my comics habits have been transferred over to the computer, between web comics and fan sites, and zines like this one. I think it's a new kind of fandom, and the companies are slowly learning to embrace that.
If you're reading this, you've embraced the idea of comics online to some degree, at least in terms of fandom and the community. So how far to the next step for all of us? When will the utopian ideas presented in Reinventing Comics be a reality?
God knows. For the time being, I'm busy living a flashback of the early 90's, wandering in my pre-computer past. And finding it not so bad.