Man, I just got beat by Mitzy in a game of paper football 38-14. I definitely have the advantage with kicking, but she got the lucky bounces.

I watched Ironman the other night instead of working on my Oracle DBA II class. I don’t know why, but when the superhero movies started dropping I didn’t get excited. I could concede that the trailers looked good, and once the good reviews came in I was relieved that the films had maintained a certain amount of integrity and attained a level of success, but I still didn’t feel compelled to watch them. My concession to this was to put Ironman in NetFlix, and the Edward Norton Hulk film is in there too, somewhere. I don’t think I ever added Dark Knight, and I still haven’t seen it, even after all the hoopla. These are films I feel I should have gotten excited about, but I didn’t and that’s kind of weird.
I enjoyed Ironman, Downy Jr. was great as Tony Stark and it seems like a role he was somehow meant to play. I felt the final climatic fight at the end was a bit of a let down, it just never really got me going. Not sure how I felt about Jeff Bridges being a bad guy, but he was surprisingly good at it, so I won’t grouse about that.
All of this kind of leads me into complaining about comic books. Hellboy is what first drove me into buying books, that and coworker Jon who worked as an enabler. Watching Ironman made me remember all the great books I had read, and to some extent that old itch resurfaced. Depressingly it is an itch that will find little or no traction, and that all comes down to money. No matter how good the material I just find it so very difficult now to drop $3-$4 per book in what amounts to about 5-10 minutes of reading enjoyment.
When my comic envelopment reached its acme I was shelling out over $20 USD, and I’d was through the stack in about an hours time. The true irony was that, at the time, I would download the Harry Potter series in PDF so as to avoid the expense of buying the books. After I realized what I was doing I just dropped my comics habit cold turkey. It was that sudden realization that made me feel a little betrayed by my own instincts. I can and could try to justify it by going into how the comics are great mixture of literature and art, and some most definitely are, but the sad fact is that I can pay $14-$25 on a new novel and be entertained for up to a month. I’m a slow reader.
I wish I could see some sort of compromise, or solution for the comics industry. I think it’s an art form that is very valuable and relevant, that and very entertaining when done right. But I can get web comics for free, and even a free online web based comic book in the form of Ellis’ Freak Angels . There’s always the option of Trade Paperbacks, but those just aren’t the same. They don’t give the same tactile satisfaction, I’m not sure I can explain it. I seem satisfied with get my comics fix via the web, being free doesn’t hurt and the convenience is nice, though it cuts out the store experience; which, has an odd appeal in and of itself.
This conversation on pricing was going on when I first got into comics back in ’05, and I imagine it has been going on for a long time. Now that they got this depression on I’m not sure what will happen, especially after reading that the base price for most books will go to either $3.99 or $4.99. Either way that’s a lot per book. Unfortunately for me this means that I’ll remain ostracized from the comic book store, and that I will most likely never return to it.