I've been enjoying 2000ad since I could read, and have followed it through the decades on a weekly basis, indulging in some of the best comics I've ever read in my life, so you're goddamn right I get emotionally invested in the weekly progs.
The world is a horrible place, full of terrible people doing terrible things, but that weekly dose of thrillpower, usually read while I'm walking away from the local newsagent, is just a tiny taste of pure happiness that I could still grab onto - and even that is now being taken away from me.
Because while 2000ad is as good as it ever was - it really is! - and even though I was delighted to find a local thrill-merchant who understood the importance of the weekly hit, I'm still going to have to stop getting it because unlimited thrillpower still can't stand up to the brutality of late stage capitalism.
The first regular issue of 20000ad I ever bought cost 55c. Then it was 77c, then 95c, then $1.35, and on and on. There would be a regular increase in price of between 20 and 50 cents every year or so, and that was the price to pay.
I always thought I might give it up when it went over the $10 mark, but it quietly did that a few years ago, and I stuck with it, largely due to the entirely unexpected brilliance of late Abnett, and it was hovering over the $11 mark when I had to quit it last year due to geographical prejudice.
It took me a while to find a place that actually still the Galaxy's Greatest Comic when I came back to the big city, but then I was sorted, and had even picked up a whole bunch of the ones I'd missed in the past year on the second hand market
And then some fucker, somewhere down the line, decided to hike the price by almost 50 percent to more than $16 an issue in my part of the world, and now I just feel like a drokking mug.
It's now terrible value for money, and it's particularly galling because the Judge Dredd Megazine remains the best value for money in modern comics, at $22 for 130 pages. I did the math - a new issue of the Meg is about eight cents a page, a 2000ad is more than fifty cents a page. That's just bad economics.
Of course I could fucking afford $16 a week - you can't even get a decent lunch for that much these days - but that's not the point. If I wait a few months, I'm sure I can get most of the missing progs for less than $5 each. I just feel like a fool paying full price when I see those kinds of deals in the following weeks and months.
It's a return to the most non-linear of reading experiences, but it's not like the regular weekly issue down the local shop is that regular anyway, it's been three weeks since they got an issue in.
I definitely don't blame my local merchant, he's as baffled by these price rises and I am, and the actual prog remains the same UK price it's been, but somewhere down the line, someone thought of people like me, regular readers who have stuck with the prog through good times and bad, and decided to ream us for all we're worth.
Sometimes it feels like the only real power you have in a late stage capitalist society is the ability to say 'no, fuck off, I'm not buying that', and that's all I've got left.
There are no other options, reading digital comics on tablets and phones just feels like work, and a weekly subscription would be more expensive, and would be less reliable - a 30-year love affair with the UK movie magazine Empire has finally come to a grinding halt this year because my regular subscription had become increasingly irregular, and it doesn't feel worth it when a quarter of the issues never even turn up anymore.
So it's the secondary market for me, which even though stops me feeling like I'm being taken for a ride, does make me feel guilty that I'm not financially supporting the actual comic and all its great staff and creators. I'll certainly get some of the forthcoming missing issues in three years or so when the 2000ad shop starts selling them off for pence, like they always do, and I may have to get the odd digital copy just to see what Wagner is doing, or to see how the imminent Ennis/Flint Dredd v Alpha thing shakes out, or even to see what the hell is going on in the brilliant Brink.
I won't be a regular reader anymore, but I'll still be collecting the comic as much as possible. And I'll still get the Meg, until somebody starts asking $40 for it.
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