Here in the lull between Christmas and New Year’s we’re supposed to fill the time looking back (composing top ten lists, reflective year in review essays, and the like), but I’m afraid I’m stuck here in the present, looking forward.  As previously mentioned Super-Fly Comics & Games is moving; effective January 2nd the store will be taking up residence once door down, our new location effectively doubling our floor space.  And because of the Christmas holiday the first day there will also be New Comic Book Day; at the very least it’s going to be interesting.

I mean “look forward to” in the loosest terms possible.  So far all I can think of is a live action movie version of Bakugon Battle Brawlers and the return of Azrael.  Not Vext, Major Bummer, The Heckler, Xero, Fanboy or any of the other short-lived DC characters form the same period much more deserving of a revival.  The depths of my incredulous exasperation at the news would make for one hell of a snide REALLY!?! with Seth and Amy SNL Weekend Update segment.  War Machine is already back, now Azrael... maybe this means the return of the rest of the edgier doppelgangers of the brand name Marvel/DC superheroes are already on their way.

Meaning somewhere Thunderstrike has just risen from his grave.

And finally there’s Frank Miller on the Buck Rogers movie. I suppose it’s wrong of any of us to automatically assume Mr. Miller will once again refuse to alter his individual style to meet the needs of the material he’s adapting, but if you’d like to see what his version of Buck will look like I would like to place the following into evidence:

Frank Miller + Buck Rogers = Lance Blastoff, his character from the 80s published by Dark Horse.

I give Marvel and DC equal amounts of grief (when they have it coming, of course) but it occurs to me I haven’t given Marvel nearly enough credit lately.  Ideologically I still don’t think I’m going to like where Dark Reign is going but so far I can’t complain about the quality of the comics, and I’ve got to be grateful the relaunch of Agents Of Atlas is tied into it (maybe now it’ll have a better chance of reaching an audience large enough to sustain it on an ongoing basis).

The truth is there are Marvel titles I actually look forward to reading (Thor, Hulk and, yes, even Amazing Spider-Man), but the publisher also has a lot of material designed for both new readers and new kinds of readers.    That's material like the Marvel Adventures line, the still unnamed European reprint imprint, the literary adaptations, heck, now they’re finally going to do a modern Millie the Model comic in the form of Models Inc. (if this keeps up I fully expect the month will come when I’ll see a solicitation for a new Silly Seal & Ziggy Pig comic in Marvel Previews).  And more important than their good intentions these attempts at audience outreach seem to have been successful, or at least successful enough for them to keep doing them.

Compare all that to DC, which under Dan Didio seems to have fallen into a "circle the wagons" mentality (i.e., it’s not about increasing business so much as not going out of business).  I’ve ragged on both Dan and DC but it also occurs to me from the way Dan so often tells us this or that “isn’t his job” maybe this is exactly the way parent company Time-Warner wants things.  Maybe they don’t make much of an effort, but they’re not losing any money either.

Finally, I believe I have inadvertently stumbled across “the answer," the one that will not only save the comic book industry but the medium as well, while doing some good for the economy or ecology.  I found it on the final page of Disney Fairies Tinker Bell, an apparent one shot magazine promoting the recent Tinker Bell direct-to-DVD animated film.

“Please Recycle This Magazine”

Now when I’ve seen this before, I’ve even started obeying it.  Instead of going into the trash my old copies of Entertainment Weekly and Esquire now go in with the rest of the recyclables.  But somehow seeing this message in a comic magazine made me realize comic books are most likely the only kind of publication in America that doesn’t prompt us to recycle them.

And it’s about time they start.  The comic book buying paradigm has shifted from collectibles to collections.  You buy the monthly pamphlets, then the collection, so why hang onto the individual issues?  You (well I certainly) simply can’t throw them away, so there they sit in long boxes, taking up space, bagged and boarded, redundant, unnecessary.

The only way comic books are ever going to increase in value is if the demand for them increases or the supply decreases and since we can control one and not the other the only sane thing we can do is start hauling some of our back issues to the recycling bin (and dropping some off at pizza places, doctor’s offices or any other place people are forced to wait wouldn’t be a bad idea either).

My modest proposal: each and every one of us should use this down time to go through our collections to see if we can fill an entire long box full of comics we no longer want or need.  Because only by "destroying" comics can we save them.