“I am a stupid motherfucker.
For some reason, I have not learned my lesson about flipping through a comic. Even one that I’m taking home for free from the library, and therefore do not need to make an informed decision about. I COULD just start in, and if it sucks, it’s not like back when and I have to wait six months until I can save up enough to buy more trades at Mile High Comics.
And so, because I can’t resist the ol’ flipthrough, I completely spoiled the ending for myself on this one. Very dumb.
On the note of buying comics like an hour away, man am I jealous of these youths who can go to a legit bookstore and find comics. Also, the re-rise of comic book shops couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. My peak fandom was right during the decline of the comic book shop. Now they’re back. How did I manage that timing?
Also, with the legit bookstore, you can actually return a trade paperback, which is something I actually did once.
I was going somewhere on a plane. I can’t remember where because it’s been like 10 years, but I picked up Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles vol. 1 for the trip.
Being a comic book dork, of course I started reading it the night before because fuck waiting.
I read the whole thing, and I hated it so much I returned it to the book store. Which seems like such a weird thing to do. Do people do that with books? Read the whole thing and then return them to the bookstore because they ended up disliking them? I guess it’s a little like sending back a dinner after you ate the whole thing…but also not because, hell, I would think you’d know the meal was terrible pretty early on. With a book, it’s different, right? If the ending is all fucked up, maybe it’s like if you ate a really good meal and then got a note from the chef that was like “I prepared all of this without washing my hands, and I took a dump that, well, no need for the details, just know everything is ruined and I’ve kinda invalidated every time you’ve washed your hands in your entire life.”
I feel like this is a thing that used to happen at movies too. Not taking dumps, the refund thing. If people hated them, they’d walk out and ask for a refund. Is that still a thing? I feel like maybe not. To be fair, in 1993 you couldn’t really find out a lot of info about a movie. There was the two fucking columns in a newspaper where some asshole who had seen every movie ever said whether or not he liked it, and then that was it. Meanwhile, they had an entire section in the newspaper called Who’s New that just listed everyone who was born the day before. I’m walking into Speed 2: Cruise Control with no warning. Who was asleep at the wheel back then? I can see some idiot named Jimmy was born yesterday, but no one tells me that although Speed was pretty successful with an unlikely premise, Speed 2 is for shit, and will actually make you miss Keanu Reeves in a role.”