Comics are generally treated like collectibles these days, not like consumable vessels of art, which is how they were treated by their mostly adolescent readers in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when the value of a comic book was in no small part the ability to trade it for other comic books, and thereby read as many of them as possible.
Compare comics to the paperback trade and we see that one loses value once it's 'used' and the other gains value once it's a 'back issue.' Collectors do, in fact, project an aura onto individual comic books, mostly because of their historical significance (first issue of Wolverine, first time Superman kisses Lois, signed by artist, etc.), but notice that the history is both in terms of the publishing industry and in terms of the internal history of the narratives. Both form their own mythologies, in a sense.
This causes some problems, though, because the circulation of comics is limited to whomever they're sold to, as opposed to books, magazines, and newspapers, which get handed off, lent to friends, resold at a cheaper rate, etc. By clinging to an aura-based model of comics as art *objects*, the industry limits its popularity, and the art form in the American context remains within an isolated little sub-group. Hence the community stays small *because of* the reverence it pays towards the comic-book as an object.
The emergence of digital comics and the almost necessary move to a code- or signal-based concept of the aura (or to no aura at all, as Benjamin suggests) could change that. We don't know yet, though, so I can only cast educated guesses. I was trying to demonstrate a code-based understanding of art when I talked about the loss of my own digital collection, how quickly I collected it again, and how that didn't bother me on an emotional level because it's just data. That said, I have a powerful emotional bond with the data itself, the content, the actual stories that are told in the medium. That's as far as I can go with that, for now.
Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 3:11 PM