Comics are really bloody expensive

So I just dropped over $200 at the comic book shop, almost entirely on trade paperbacks. Now granted, I love the medium, I'm pretty flush these days, I've admitted to myself that it's a priority in my life to spend real money on books/DVDs/comics/magazines, and it's been a couple of months at least since I've bought comics -- a recipe for an expensive outing.

But I've also made a conscious effort for the past several years to restrict my comics purchases to my favorite stuff, which basically adds up to witty genre-bending work written by snarky Brits. This isn't quite so esoteric and trivial a category as the uninitated might imagine -- but still, it leaves out a lot of interesting books that my younger self, with his more catholic tastes, might have wanted to pick up.

Glen Engel-Cox is right, the comics industry has spiraled into madness.

One of these days I’m going to post my graph about how comics, as a consumable media, has outpaced inflation in comparison to others, and in comparison to the other options for a child/teen’s dollar at the convenience store. It’s not the trade paperback that’s killing the comic market, John Bryne and Peter David, it’s the exorbidant cost of your monthly comic.