I’ve long been a collector of comics – as Mrs Earth-Prime can attest, I have boxes full of the things, not to mention shelves groaning under the weight of trade paperbacks and while I have a steady stream of new comics coming in each week, I’ll occasionally pick up runs of series I missed first time around. Over the last few years, for example, I’ve picked up the John Ostrander Suicide Squad, the complete Darkstars and a couple of mini-series, not to mention the various tie-in issues for the annotations I’m working on.
(Which reminds me, must get back to War of The Gods . . . )
A few months ago, I joined Comixology more out of curiosity than anything, and ended up buying the digital version of Crisis on Infinite Earths because it seems I was unhappy with only having three versions of it already.
Looking through the site yesterday, though, I noticed they have the complete run of LEGION from the late 80s and early 90s, a series that I was tempted by at the time but back then I only had so much money for comics. Every issue is £1.49 which (as I already have a couple of crossover issues with series I was collecting) means I’d spend about £100 and have the entire lot stored in the cloud within minutes.
Or, I could go to My Comic Shop and pick up the back issues; most of them are $1.35; with postage that would be approximately £120 and would take between 8 and 14 days to arrive . . . but they’d be in my hands as opposed to on screen.
It comes to something when the deciding factor isn’t price but format.
Crisis on Earth-Prime 