Previously in Confessions of a Comics Reader, I revealed that I followed last summer’s triumphant escape from a lifelong comic book habit with a recent relapse, purchasing single issues for the first time in over a year. These single issues are fairly unique, appearing in a format that’s unlikely to be collected in a way that’s as fine and affordable of a showcase as the twelve broadsheet issues coming out weekly. For that reason, it feels a little less like a betrayal of my prior pledge–I haven’t gone back to buying comic books, exactly–but it has still revived the gladly abandoned practice of finding time to get to the comic shop on a weekly basis.

I have been faithful to Wednesday Comics. I purchased the tenth issue today and will be returning to procure the final two over the course of the next couple of weeks. Through all these visits, I’ve only made one other purchase, the first issue of the current Detective Comics run by Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III. The art in it is beautiful and innovative, and clearly is going to be better served in an eventual collected format, freed for the off-putting interruptions of loud, gruesomely ugly ads for video games and other nonsense. Otherwise, I’ve collectively spent no more than a total of five minutes examining the other periodicals in the shop across all these weeks.

I have, however, gotten to know the proprietor somewhat, driven mostly by his reasonable interest in generating awareness for the store among the potential customers paying tuition at my current place of employment. To that end, he generously donated a box of comics to be placed in the on-campus coffee shop for students to peruse. Naturally, I couldn’t resist poking through there myself.

There’s a nice array of comics in the box: licensed adventures, Vertigo stalwarts, oddball hits, and a hearty offering of standard superhero comics from the Big Two. I read through a lot of them, discovering that Amanda Conner‘s marvelously expressive art goes a long way towards making Power Girl a fun title and that Brian Bendis’s New Avengers is an abrasive, unreadable mess. I found that Brian Wood’s Northlanders is sharp but uninvolving, and that Marvel can revisit one of one their more rewarding endeavors from the past twenty years with results that are diminished, but not damnably so.

I also found that the thrill remains gone. Even the best of this material didn’t make me feel compelled to rush out and get more, to rededicate myself to collecting new issues, consuming these ongoing, endless sagas one issue at a time. The glossy testimonies to wonderment have left me behind. Perhaps I’ve outgrown them. Perhaps they’ve largely lost their charm, their energy, their verve. Maybe it’s a little of both. The creativity on display in Wednesday Comics is one thing, the dull trudge of monthly comics largely crafted with the eventual collections in mind is quite another.

So, despite my proclamations, I returned to the colorful dazzle of the comic shop. Unwittingly, that comic shop provided the means for me to determine that once the unique title that lured me there completes its run, I can retreat again without regret.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)