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

Prior to that, my last serialized purchase was back in 2006, with Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's colossal series Street Angel (Slave Labour Graphics).

Of course, comic books are, and always will be, cockroach-spliced to my DNA. I hadn't given up on the genre wholesale, on the contrary, I was far more stoked on earbanging art school grads with phrases like "sequential art" and "Tomine." This required a deliberate shift away from Wolverine and towards crippling indie phonebooks.

At the height of this particular insanity, my reasons felt infinite: 

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. A single issue couldn't store well and became a Thanos-esque pain to transport.
4. I couldn't use my wikipedic knowledge of Crazy Quilt to win over girls.
5. Again: frothy sea of comic store chuds.

With all those concerns—storage, value, getting laid—it was almost too easy to turf monthlies from my escalating debt load. This was not without risks, as I quickly devolved into a lazy, academic, arms-crossed wank more psyched on bookshelf length than the sheer thrill of a story.

Then three years later, walking past the towers of Moore and Eisner, I bought the best $2.99 of 2009: Batman And Robin #3 (DC). Plates shifted.

There was a strange inversion of priorities at work, one that steadily grew with age. 'Traditional' comic books—those 24 pg, cheap paper stock, Got Milk? affairs I was more than happy to ignore—became a tidy fit for an increasingly busy life.

This began with an old issue of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men (Marvel), sent my way by a friend from Newfoundland. The story, Whedon's attempt to shoehorn the X-Men back into spandex after the staggering Grant Morrison years, unspooled exactly over my subway commute.

I was curious: could other comics sit flush in the many gaps between points A and B (and C, D, ..., A1)? I started to pit random singles against the endless hamster wheel of cubicle life. Eightball. Iron Fist. Hellboy. Over the weeks, I introduced more of them into my life; over laundry, cooking, while waiting on friends.

What floored me the most was how much I enjoyed the idea of waiting for the next issue. Drowning in torrents, there's something innately pure about salivating 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 been about total replacement, has it? No format goes extinct. And I've continually argued that all that's changed is the rate at which we, the consumers, digest content We're at a stage where the choice in how we consume, is infinite. Some want the comfort of an entire run, others, the electricity 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)

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'd taken completely for granted. Reassuring too, that while the industry hypes retrograde moves like motion comics and further Spider-Man retcons, I can still be enthralled by a few stapled pages of dudes in tights smashing other dudes in tights.

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