Batman And Robin #3 © DC Entertainment 2009I bought a comic the other day. A single issue. 

Now before that, my last 'serial comic' was purchased in 2006.  Jim Rugg's colossal miniseries, Street Angel (Slave Labour Graphics).

Of course, comic books are cockroach-spliced to my DNA. I hadn't given up on the genre wholesale so much as I was more stoked on earbanging art school grads with phrases like "sequential art" and "Tomine." This required a deliberate shift away from Wolverine and Pounded (Oni Press) and towards crippling indie phonebooks.

My reasons for dropping single comics were infinite. Some gems: 

1. There was never a guarantee that a series would maintain any quality. See: The Astonishing Wolf-Man, (Image). 
2. Buying the collected run of anything was better than scrambling over pungent wizards for that last dog-earred copy of Skrull Kill Krew (Marvel).
3. Trade paperbacks/'graphic novels' were often a 'value-laden' format.
4. A single issue didn't store well and became a Thanos-esque pain to transport.
5. Couldn't use my wikipedic knowledge of Crazy Quilt to win over girls.
6. Again: frothy sea of comic store chuds.

With all those concerns—storage, value, getting laid—it was almost too easy to turf monthlies.

tl;dr I devolved into a lazy, academic, wank more stoked on bookshelf length than the thrill of a comic book.

But three years later, ignoring the shelves of Moore, Tomine, and Eisner, I bought the best $2.99 of 2009: Batman And Robin #3 (DC).

There's a strange inversion of priorities at work here, one that seemingly arcs higher with age. 'Traditional' comic books—the 24 page, cheap paper stock, Got Milk? affairs I was more than happy to stop buying—suddenly became a tidy fit for my increasingly busy life.

This began with an old copy of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men (Marvel), sent my way by a friend from Newfoundland. The story that issue unspooled happened to be the exact length of my subway commute. I was curious, and began to pit random singles against the endless hamster wheel cubicle life. Over the weeks, I gradually introduced more of them into my life; over laundry, pints, cooking--while waiting on friends.

What floors me the most is how much I enjoy the idea of waiting for that next issue. Drowning in torrents, there's something innately pure about being forced to salivate over the next chapter. Instead of shooting a quick fix with a season's worth of content, I'd have to pace hip-deep grooves all over my apartment, waiting; cursing.

That sense of serialized reward, chiseled undoubtably out of mountains of nostalgia, isn't for everyone. But the single issue/collected edition debate has never truly been about complete replacement, has it? No format goes extinct. I've continually argued that all that's changed is the rate at which we, the consumers, want content. As an audience we still crave entertainment, we're just now at a stage where the choice in how we consume, is infinite. Some need the comfort of a series' entire run, others, the thrill of following a story in the now.

And for lesser-known titles there's also a very real danger in using the "I'll wait for the trade" argument (emphasis added):

I can't blame anybody who waits for the trade, for whatever reason. But when the [David] Lapham fan behind the counter in the hipster comic shop doesn't carry a series, doesn't buy the single issues himself, and plans to buy the collections, we're obviously having a disconnect. I mean, it was canceled. 

- The Direct Market Death of 'Young Liars' by John Parker (via Comics Alliance)

Brutal, that.

Obviously, I'll keep buying the OGNs, the trades. My new love for the single hasn't replaced the allure of a collected tome (someday, Absolute Planetary, someday). There's just a welcome return of a facet of my hobby I had taken completely for granted. Reassuring too, that while the industry hypes idiot moves like motion comics and Spider-Man retcons, I can still be enthralled by a few stapled pages of dudes in tights smashing other dudes in tights.

Just, uh, how's Bats getting out of this one?