Palomar

I've had this book sitting on my bookshelf for a long time. I'd pick it up and read a story here and there. When Love and Rockets was first published back in the early nineties I picked it up and fell in love with the stories immediately. I loved both Jamie and Gilbert, but to me Gilbert's work was always a bit more special. His stories of the city of Palomar was unlike anything in comics. In the last week or so I've been re-reading the saga of Palomar. This book is five hundred pages and collects all of the stories Gilbert did between 1993 and 2002. This book will take your breath away. It's that good. This isn't comics, it's literature.

A companion volume Luba is scheduled to come out soon. This five hundred page volume collects the stories since the end of Palomar. I can't wait to get it. These are stories that I missed on their first time out for the most part. After the brothers suspended their regular publication of Love and Rockets I found it hard to keep up with them. So I'm excited that most of these stories will be new to me.

Now it just has to hurry up and come out.

Whether to Buy?

I'm a strong supporter of my Local Comic Shop. Always have been and always will be. Back in the day if I happened to pick up a comic someplace that I had in my folder back at the comic shop I made it a point to still pay for the comic in the folder, I had it on hold, I just felt like I should pay for it.

But I have a problem. Books like the above, the new Starman hardcover collection. It sells for $49.99 at my LCS. On Amazon I can buy it for $36.49. (And actually it was advertised for $31.99 up until recently.) Even if my LCS offers me a discount, which might be 10%, I'm still saving ten dollars or more if I buy it from Amazon. That's a good bit of money as far as I'm concerned.

I want to buy my purchases from my LCS, but I can't justify paying that much extra money for a book when I get it for a much less expensive price.

I buy all my comics from the LCS but I admit that I've bought other hardback collections from Amazon. The two Love and Rockets collection, Invincible, Runaways and others. I still buy my trade paperbacks from the LCS, so the Daredevil, Walking Dead, Fables collection all come from my LCS. The difference in price with the hardbacks is just too big to pass up.

So what do you do?