Trades or Floppies?

This seems to be one of the new questions when it comes to the comic business. Trades or floppies? Do you want to buy a floppy (individual issue) comic once a month for about $3 that contains a part of a story in about 30 pages? Or, do you want to buy a book bound, 100-200 page comic every 6-8 months for $10-20 each?

To put it simply, I go both ways. At the moment, most of my comic buying is in floppies. As I've said before, I buy Marvel books, and, if you don't know this, most of these happen to be superhero comics. The way Marvel and DC run their businesses these days is to have numerous crossovers and events. Therefore, to get the entire picture of what is happening in the universe and in these big events, I need to keep up with each of these. To do this in the trades, I would need to buy way more than I do now, by buying all of the trades, not just the floppies that relate to the event I am interested in.

I also usually find the floppies to be cheaper. For instance, each floppy, with my hold file discount, costs me about $2.25. Each trade consists of an average of 5 issues and usually costs $15. So, the same issues that cost $11.25 in floppy format cost $15 in trade. Now, there are the occasional sales at Amazon.com or at the comic shop where I can get these trades for about $10. This, unfortunately, is not the norm, however, so I can't rely on these.

The biggest problem for me with floppies is that I can sometimes have a problem keeping up with the story a month or more after the last chapter. Trades can solve this problem by containing the entire story in one place. I can start at the beginning and read the entire thing without having to wait.

I am still kinda impatient, however, and don't want to have to wait. But, there is one huge reason why I buy trades. Older material. I'm not sure how most comic shops work, but mine tries to buy only as many copies of a particular issue as they plan to sell. And they do a good job of it. Smart guys. However, this means that I can't guarantee back issues. Trades solve this problem.

There are currently three series that I buy regularly: Y: The Last Man, Fables, and DMZ. All of these kind of remind me of serialized TV shows like Lost, Heroes, Alias, and all the others. They have self-contained stories, but also have an overarching story that plays out over the series. These are perfect for trades.

As I see it, I can go either way. I like both formats, but what I like the most is a good story. Give me that and the rest is secondary. I understand that many folks in the industry feel that it will move more towards all trades and no floppies, and if that is the case, so be it, just give me fun things to read and I will be all over it!