THE UNBOXING - UPDATE

You may have noticed my last "Unboxing" post was in July. Three months have passed since, with no sign of a new one!

Well, in theory I haven't stopped doing Unboxing posts -- but a confluence of events have led to the feature's absence recently. First and foremost, Marvel, DC, and the rest just haven't been offering a whole lot of stuff that piques my interest. As anyone who drops by here knows, my main comic book tastes lean toward the Bronze Age through the nineties with a strong emphasis on Spider-Man and the X-Men, and there hasn't been a ton of material on that front lately. Which isn't to say I don't have things coming -- there are four Omnibuses and two trade paperbacks on the horizon, but at the moment that's about it.

The other reason I haven't been receiving as much is that, as noted several times in recent months, I discovered the appeal of digital comics late last year. Digital collections are great for stuff I have less emotional investment in. Where before, I might have grabbed a random trade collecting classic Marvel or DC stuff I'd never read, now I'll do it digitally instead, either via Marvel Unlimited or Amazon/Comixology. It's a much smaller monetary investment in something I'm unsure of, and it takes up no physical space on my shelf. Plus, I'm especially inclined now to try digital for stuff from the non-Big Two. IDW, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, whatever -- with rare exceptions, it's digital all the way as far as I'm concerned.

Thus I've more-or-less decided that, except for material I absolutely know I want to own -- which, since I have a great deal of the other stuff I'd want on my shelves already, is mainly classic Spider-Man, nineties X-Men, seventies Batman, and maybe a handful of other things at this point -- I'm likely to go digital in the future. No more blind buys of trades, or especially Omnibuses, on material I've never read, unless it's something universally acclaimed which I know I want, like MASTER OF KUNG FU or (spoiler alert for a future Unboxing) JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL.

Of course there are other, non-comic book things I buy. All those newspaper strip collections I've talked about recently for example, and certain other collections of material I'm trying out, outside of the superhero genre, which aren't available digitally at all. Plus every Christmas my wife gives me the two Carl Barks Duck books released by Fantagraphics in the preceding year. But I don't receive regular monthly pre-ordered shipments of those things; I usually watch the Amazon Marketplace for deals after they've been released, saving up gift cards to blow on them. Maybe I'll start doing Unboxings for those as I receive them, to supplement the regular stuff. Or perhaps I can do a monthly "Digital Unboxing", though that doesn't seem nearly as fun (and I buy most of my digital stuff on sale too, so it would rarely be current).

I'll figure something out. But for now, just know that I haven't forgotten the Unboxing, and it hasn't forgotten you. It'll be back, maybe next month or maybe in December. We'll just have to wait and see.