Compare and contrast with the standard American comics format, the pamphlet. (For the record, blogosphere, I prefer the term "floppy," but pamphlet seems to have stuck.) It's much bigger than a book, but also much thinner and, well, floppier. In that sense it's closer to a magazine, but it's thinner than most magazines as well. Outside of Marvel, chances are good that its paper quality is closest to a tabloid or newspaper. Of course, it's work of literature (broadly defined, for the most part), though, so it's alienated once again from its magazine and newspaper similarities. And of course, there's no spine to speak of, so you're stuck with sticking them in longboxes if you want to keep them around and in reach. The pamphlet comic book is this weird non-thing, in a twilight zone of bad design, bad size, bad durability, bad quality. Plus, now that most mainstream publishers have switched to telling genuinely serialized stories (as opposed to more-or-less complete tales with a "to be continued" thrown in during the last half page, or installments in ongoing soap operas with no beginning, middle, and end), the pamphlet is being used as a containment device for one-fifth of a story, and it's one hell of an awkward container. I happen to think that mainstream comics have, in the main, improved in quality since this new mode of storytelling took effect, and to me the pamphlet is now an obsolete mode of delivery for the kind of stories even the big superhero characters are being used to tell--not to mention an expensive one: prices for most pamphlet comic books hover around $3.00, which means you're paying quite a bit for not a whole lot of story.

Now, I know that fanboys (and we're not just talking about superhero people here--I've seen altcomix titans talk about the dusty books in their longboxes with a level of nostalgic sentimentality that'd make a Norman Rockwell retrospective look like a 24-hour live reenactment of the making of "Piss Christ") talk about the charm that these objects (the pamphlet comic books) have. In addition to the "that's how I read 'em as a kid" factor, there's the "monthly fix" element in terms of storytelling method. But in business, charm is for cereal-hawking leprechauns. And comics is a business, protestations of the "it's art!" crowd be damned. It has to be, or everyone from Brian Michael Bendis to Chris Ware would be reduced to xeroxing minicomic copies of the new Powers or Acme Novelty Library and swapping them over the internet. The pamphlet is an obstacle to selling comics to non-traditional comics fans.

(And yes, I think a lot of these complaints still apply to trade paperbacks, and in some cases even hardcovers. Though the range in size of literary fiction and prose nonfiction hardcovers means that comics hardcovers don't stand as far out from the crowd, in many cases they're even more expensive than a fat first-run hardcover novel. And the trade paperbacks suffer from that same "what the hell size am I trying to be?" problem that besets the pamphlets which comprise them. Of course, don't even get me started on how haphazard and slapdash trade dress is for these things. Christ, my shelves look like they were stocked with books from a printing press run by the zombies from 28 Days Later. Production values at art-house publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf, and (real bookstore publisher) Pantheon tend to offset these drawbacks, both because the books are thoughtfully designed and formatted and because the content within them tends to be so self-evidently good that idiosyncratic packaging is less of a distraction or impediment.)