Emanata: New Year’s Resolutions

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It’s New Year’s Eve–the time for setting intentions and goals for the year ahead–and as a devoted comics reader, a few of my New Year’s resolutions this year have to do with the way I deal with my favorite medium. Here are some of the ones I’d like to follow through with in 2011.

Be more conscious about where my comics dollar is going. The combination of an ongoing economic crunch, multiple new models for the comics business, and my hopeless addiction to funnybooks means I need to think a bit more about where I’m actually spending my money, and who benefits from it. In practice, that usually means that I’d rather subsidize creators than intermediaries, although I also like supporting other deserving spots along the economic chain that could use a hand–good retail stores and adventurous small publishers, especially.

Fortunately, comics is one of those media that often make it possible to pay creators directly. In the new year, I’m going to try to buy comics (or original art, or merchandise, or whatever) from the people who made them more often: at conventions, by mail-order, via webcomics artists’ tip-jar buttons.

(More on TIME.com: The Best Graphic Novels of 2010)

Read more kinds of comics–especially in translation. There are more comics from Europe and Asia in print in English right now than there have ever been before, and for the most part they constitute a huge blind spot for me and for lots of other readers like me. I like the Osamu Tezuka books that Vertical’s been publishing over the past few years, and have run across a couple of more recent projects that I like a lot too, but that’s the equivalent of having an interest in country music limited to Hank Williams and “Goodbye Earl.” One mission for this year is going to be finding some more manga that I can get into. Another is going to be diving more deeply into English translations of Francophone comics–I’d like to explore the Humanoids imprint in its various incarnations, finish the volumes of the Dungeon series that have come out in America, and…

Read Tintin. I’ve probably read about half of Hergé’s classic Eurocomics series at one time or another, but between Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature and Charles Burns’ X’ed Out, I’ve read more about Tintin than actual Tintin books lately. It’s about time I treated myself to the real thing in its entirety. For that matter, I’d like to…

Read some other long serials in order. One of the things I love about reading comics is getting immersed in really, really long narratives–not just great ones but pretty good ones–and there are a lot of them that I’ve only dabbled in and would probably enjoy diving into full-on. This could be a good year to tackle all of Hellblazer in order, or all of the Golden Age Captain Marvel stories, or all of Strontium Dog. This isn’t a matter of expanding my horizons like some of the other resolutions here, or trying to do something morally good or self-improving: the part that requires “resolution” is that it’s going to take some organizing to pull off.

(More on TIME.com: The Best Comic Books of 2010)

Purge, and share. A few weeks ago, a new acquaintance, on hearing that I was into comics, started talking excitedly about her favorites, then stopped herself midsentence and asked, with a worried expression: “Do you… collect?” Well, in the sense that comics tend to come into my house and not go out again, yes. But comics readers have an unfortunate and well-earned reputation as a finicky bunch, more concerned with preserving mass-produced artifacts in optimal condition for later resale (to other collectors!) than in sharing the pleasure of what’s inside those Mylar bags and plastic slabs. And we tend to hold on to comics we don’t particularly care about, just because they make the collection more complete–a principle by which “collecting” can turn into hoarding.

So a personal objective for 2011 is to find better homes for the comics I own and don’t love. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to pull out any book or pamphlet from my collection and know what’s special about it, why I like it, what it means to me; after more than three decades, I’m not lacking for comics that fit that description. Even more than that, though, I want to be more generous about sharing the comics I do love with friends who’ll love them too; they’re not doing anyone any good on a shelf or in a box. And if that means that some of my favorites leave my house and don’t come back again, I think that’s a fair price for not condemning myself to being a collector.