That's a pretty significant contradiction to his assertion the work should stand alone.

Ok, so using your logic, he's okay writing the further adventures of other people's characters so long as he does it BEFORE he critizes the practice.

Timing is everything.

The prices got ridiculous. Four bucks for 22 pages?

The stories got so decompressed that every issue was one part of an 18-part story arc, and combined with blown deadlines and late shipping, it could take years for one story to be completed -- long after I'd forgotten how it started.

Many of the superhero characters for whom I felt a nostalgic affection got dropped into "adult" stories involving ass-rape and graphic decapitation and disembowelment.

Once I canceled my pull list, it was easy to break ties with the new comics business. Now I can grab, from Amazon, the occasional trade collection of new material that interests me, such as the Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips crime-noir stuff, and avoid the latest rebooting of Nu Superman.

What you did was talk out of both sides of your mouth.

Unless it was a necessary experiment to test the critical understanding of why the work should stand alone.

Nope. He's okay to do it whenever. Because what he did was Classical Intellectual Theft to place those characters in his own work, not attempting to expand canonical continuity of the original works.

That's pretty much what got me to take a big break from comics as well.

But I was thinking, why is it that when Marvel and DC superhero comics get too expensive, too padded, and too "adult," do we give up on comics altogether?

Why not just start buying and reading other comics from Vertigo, or Image (which is still 2.99 mostly), and all the other independents?

I wish Image success, but it's not publishing anything that interests me. I followed THE WALKING DEAD for a while, but ... eh. I liked TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD and BRONZE AGE, but a hundred years passed between issues, so I stopped caring.

I enjoyed Vertigo for the first decade of its existence, through the run of PREACHER. More recently, it specializes in lovely painted covers with godawful chicken-scratch interior artwork. SCALPED was OK, the afore-mentioned interior artwork notwithstanding. Not being a 12-year-old girl, the vampire and fairy tale stories don't excite me. I hear others love that sort of thing, though.

The indie comics ... yep, when I do buy a new trade or graphic novel these days, it's usually from an indie publisher.

As long as he does the comic book equivalent of hip hop, it's ok by you. Interesting.