Originally posted by beatboks
From what you've described no. I gave up on comics in the early 90's for a while because of the needless sensationalized crap being put out by both publishers just for the sake of sales. We'd gone through the death of superman and reign of the Superman and breaking fo the Bat, Over at Marvel Fisk had discovered DD's secret ID and was attacking matt in both private, professional and heroes life to break him down, Steve was questioning his patriotism. They Killed the JSA put the LoSH through some silly little pointless mini reboot ( 5 years later) that only changed motivations, names or the gritiness of the characters. They were trouncing the Doom patrol by haning crap on their reps with the new Arani Caulder one ( which was good for the first year or so). I only came back in the fold at the end of teh 90's ( or early 2000's) when I'd heard from a friend that the JSA was back ( Goyer Johns one) and bought the back issues to it and JSA classified and a few others.
Dude, you just described my middle school years. I'm one of the suckers who bought three issues of "Death of Superman", and spent money on all those "first" gold foiled issues, and I KNEW it was a scam. But I got swept up in the hype, like everyone else.
The worst, was they tried to sucker kids into applying for "files" for 15% discounts, dumped a large list of comics in for future purchases, and once the comics built up to between 30-100 dollars, pressuring the kids to buy the comics like they're the IRS and you owe them money.. (A woman actually tried to make me give back a ball cap they gave away because I couldn't afford to buy the comics anymore and had to close the file, and her husband and co owner finally stepped in and told her "No, you don't do that to a kid".)
Completely turned me off to the hobby for a long time.