In which Jason Richardson is kind of a jerk, as expected.

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I Look At My Bookshelf, And All I See Is Money.

[Written July 22nd, while I was working on the above page.]

This is more than a little depressing.

I’ve been selling a lot of my books and DVDs via Amazon’s Marketplace. Made about two hundred bucks, which is great. That’s money I’ve turned around and, certainly, put into buying more crap I don’t need. Got the first box set of One Piece on DVD, which I think I’m gonna stick into the player once I’m done typing this, and I’ve got the big hardcover omnibus of the late, great Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck showing up on my doorstep tomorrow, I think — yeah, that’s exactly what I need, a giant doorstop of distraction, right before I’m supposed to be sitting down and cranking out the next Scwonkey Dog page!

[Later note: the One Piece has been much more of a distraction! But I’m rationing it out one episode a night, so not TOO much of a distraction! ^_-]

So here I am looking at my big impressive bookshelf, and I look right at some trade paperbacks of material I really respect — Christopher Priest’s Black Panther, one of the great Marvel Comics runs that, like, nobody read. And suddenly dollar signs appear in my eyes. “Hey, I wonder how much that goes for on Amazon right now. It can’t be in print, right?” And so I’ve gotta restrain myself. Some things, I go, “Yeah, I could part with that,” like my first collection of the old O’Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow — I loves me some Neil Adams art, but I doubt I’ll be rereading those stories any time soon. But by and large I keep catching myself looking at stuff I know I’ll want to reread someday. And this short-term gain will pale by comparison to the yearning I’ll have in the back of my mind for months — years, maybe — of not having quick and easy access to some of this material.

Okay, maybe I’m overstating things a wee bit. After all, if I were suddenly without, oh, Miller’s Daredevil, I don’t think I’d have that great a yearning. But if my old First Publishing Ninja Turtles trades vanished tomorrow, or my hardcover collections of the Furman/Senior/Wildman Transformers stuff were mislaid, I would probably cry and scream and throw a fit.

And, though I could very easily replace it, if I didn’t have a copy of Dark Knight Returns handy on a semi-permanent basis … well, like I said, I’d go buy a new copy. It’s not like there hasn’t been a time in the past twenty-plus years when it wasn’t in print, in one form or another. But as I’ve been telling folks as of late, I clearly remember sitting in my dad’s lap reading from issue #3 of that, at the tender age of five or six. (Please note: this is NOT an age the book is recommended to. Seriously. Me, I just had kind of an … interesting childhood.) Having a copy of Dark Knight handy has been as much of a staple of my life as, say, having running water in the house. I don’t know what it’s like to live in a place in a permanent way without a copy of Dark Knight.

Oh, that reminds me. The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, was excellent, and moving, and even darker than good ol’ Batman Returns, which I think was my favorite Batman movie that wasn’t animated (Mask of the Phantasm is bliss) before this one. And considering how much I loathed Batman Begins, the fact that I enjoyed the heck out of The Dark Knight should be some sort of high praise.

Except that it’s coming from me, and hey, what does my opinion matter, right?

Anyhoo, enough of the rambling. I’ve got eBay auctions to monitor. Ooh, looks like one of ‘em shot up at the last second! Yay, money! We like money! ^_^

–Jonathan

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Chapter 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.