I'm sorry, but they do. They are mainly talking heads and no action.......

They really do. One of the casualties of trades and reboots and "arcs" and miniseries is that one story idea gets stretched into 6 or 8 issues. I miss the days of the one or two issue story.

If it takes many issues, fine. But there's no question in my mind that writers are padding it these days.

Eh, most of 'em were pretty faced paced. Three stories per issue, even.

If this were Facebook, that last post would earn a "like".

This is probably my number one reason for not trying and reading more comics. These long arcs have killed the casual purchase for me -- I have to decide if I want to make a longterm commitment to a book on the spot. The answer is usually "no" for me.

I went in my LCS last Friday and browsed through the shelves. None of them had anything going on that interested me enough to buy one.

Astro City has still got it. Old style, Bronze Age pacing. One and done stories with an overarching world that is building.

Just read the first Five Ghosts trade. Talk about fast pacing.

The trade-off (no pun intended) is that the collected books read a lot better (in my opinion). I agree that on an issue by issue basis the pacing suffers a lot of the time, but I prefer to read long story arcs these days, so it works for me.

The curse of modern comics---as the price of a monthly comic rises,the amount of story in that comic drops.

There is no point to me in buying a single issue of a comic today. You get almost nothing for your money and have to wait 6 months or more to get the story. If I read something new, it's via trades, or waiting until an arc is complete and reading it all at once. I just finished all 3 All Star Western trades, and the full thing took only a little longer to read than 3 "old" comics might have.

Yeah, I've even stopped buying most modern trades as well. $18 - $30 and it takes a half hour or less to read one. That's why I won't buy one unless I absolutely love the art -- then, it becomes an art book as well.

When I do buy it's from Amazon on discounts, Hanzo. Mostly I stick with collecting big omnibus hardcovers of essential runs that I either never owned or feel I must have good copies of. I get a lot more for my money that way, and it looks nice on the shelves.

I'm surprised that the trend of "speed plotting" on TV hasn't bled into comics.

For me it's a storage and ease of use issue. Sorting floppies is fun (euphemism intended) when you have the room for it, but I no longer have the time to sort through long boxes when I'm deciding on what to read.

Plus, I haven't felt comfortable paying for a new single issue since they hit the $1 mark. The past few years I've only done it to help out friends with shops.

Yeah, the floppies are a pain in the ass.

I'm just old now. Very little looks appealing and even less gets me "pumped" to read a book.

So, basically, Hanzo wants to be pumped by floppies.

The stories in the old days were often TOO short to properly develop. Of course when stories are meant mainly for younger readers the short length fits their attention span well, which is why Carl Barks' Duck tales worked so well with 10- or 20-page lengths. A lot of the ghost stories and superhero stuff of that era still could have used more room to breathe than they got.

There's got to be a happy medium between every story being 6-20 pages long and done in one issue, and every story being six 22-page issues long. That's one thing I liked about superhero comics of the 1970s and early 1980s. The arcs varied in length. There were done-in-one stories, two or three issue arcs, and the occasional longer story. There was a little less sense of stories having passed through a Procustes' bed. I realize that a trade containing six issues' worth of material makes for a marketable price point, but do ALL the stories really have to be six issues, or multiples of six?

I often wonder if this is why a lot of the "old guard" of writers don't get much work as they write in a style that does not suit the current trade mentality. Even in the 80's, longer story arcs such as "Armor Wars" in Iron Man and "Avengers Under Siege" didn't feel drawn out or boring as there something happening and developing in every issue. I picked up issues 1 and 2 of the new FF series by Fraction and Bagley, and it took them until the end of issue 2 to blast off and go exploring the universe. At least in the days of Lee, Kirby and Byrne if the plot involved them going to the Negative Zone it didn''t take two issues of debate and talk to get them there.

Another post in agreement. A five issue trade these days (if you're lucky) reads like a single issue from days past.

You're forgetting the 6 issue build up to decide

1 - What they're having

2 - Where they are eating it

3 - Who's cooking it