Comics / Back Issues

Back Issues

   Half the fun of collecting comic books is finding older gem one has missed out in the past, or heard about reading reviews and recommendations from folks like ComicBookBin. If you already own these older gems, here's a chance to rediscover them again and go read them like it was the first time.   

Memory and history are important features of comics that have always been celebrated and covered in the comic-related media and scholarship. The history of comics has been defined through various phases, such as the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age in the case of popular American comics. Other such types of classification attempting to explain memory in comics have exist in other comics literature.

This history of comics can be explained through events but a column like the Back Issue one presented here, in terms of hermeneutics, is focused mostly on the work itself as opposed to the creators or the context in which the comics were produced. It is amazing in a way that as soon as we discuss back issues, the hermeneutic focus is on the work to the exclusion of other realities.

However, one could argue that when discussing back issues, that we do not even focus on the entire artifact, only looking at the work itself, and not the medium which it came in. This is mostly because the artifact used by the reviewer will be a unique copy of from thousands of replicated samples.

Hervé St-Louis, PhD, March 12, 2022