Mark Waid versus Brian Hayes

  

It was announced yesterday that writer Mark Waid is selling his comic collection in order to fund a venture involving online comics, also known as digital comics. 

I don't like to read comics from a computer screen. A big part of the comics milieu to me is to feel the paper and turn the page. I like paper!

Somebody must like the digicoms though, because more and more of them are becoming available. I've been asked the following: if printed comic books become extinct and if the only way new comic stories can be read was online, would I then become a convert to the cause of the digicoms? That is a good question.

I remember sitting with Poth Jeanette and Prince Catt in the audience of a comic convention panel and listening to Mark Waid tell the story of when he moved to Florida to work for Crossgen Comics. He hired movers to transport his comic collection and, so voluminous was that collection that the movers categorized him and his comics as "a family of five."

Curious, I sent a direct tweet to Mr. Waid yesterday. I asked if he was selling all of his comics or just some of them. He responded, "All. Every last one." 

To me, this sell-off is a stunt, much like DC Comics deciding to start the numbering of Action Comics over after 70 years with a new number one issue. Stunts do garner attention, though, and Mark Waid has earned himself coverage right here on the much-revered Hayfamzone Blog.

I've always liked the work of Mark Waid, dating all the way back to when he was the "boy editor" of Secret Origins for DC in the 1980s. His current Daredevil is one of the very few Marvel Comics series that I read. Though he and I part ways when he branches off into the abyss of digital comics, I wish him well in his venture nonetheless.

Here is an article with details of the big sell-off and here is Mr. Waid's blog, on which he will treat you to a free digital comic download in an attempt to entice you to want more. (Maybe you'll even scroll down the blog and see MW's very funny comment about Curt Swan's cover to House of Mystery #29.)