Dustin Doesn't Share!

Dustin Doesn't Share (and I'm telling)

I picked up my comics for the first time in two months this weekend. A sign of a good comic book store is that they’ll hold your comics for weeks and weeks. Of course, they did forget to put a lot of stuff in my box though, and this irritates me. I don’t have the ending of the Titans and I don’t have end of Young Justice. And there’s not much I can do about that. Not that I have the money anyway, but I like keeping up with these things.

When I say that I caught up on my comics, it’s another way of me saying “Dustin came to visit last weekend”.

He brought an excellent ‘zine about Superman from the West coast. I need to own this zine, and yet there was none of the usual write me here and I’ll send you another, probably because the writer also works for McSweeny’s, and therefore doesn’t really care how much his darn Superman zine sells.

Dustin also brought the new Swamp Thing graphic novel, and he totally didn’t share it, (because he wasn’t done with it) and I consider this to be a gross violation of our comic book sharing philosophy. After all, I let him read my new Hellboy, and Batgirl and Birds of Prey besides, and the end of the latest Tim Hunter thing. And yes, I totally am nine years old. I’m still nine and I’m telling on Dustin. This is our first visit in forever where we didn’t leave with stacks of each other’s reading material. It’s just intolerable, I tell you. I won’t stand for it.

The last good swap we had was back in March. And then at Devonstock he brought me my stuff back but I didn’t have his…so he took his stuff back this time and I had little to share, because the move just wiped me out, financially, you know? Our fandom is a very commercial thing. So when you’re poor, you’re out of the loop. He took back his golden age DC and his Madman. I read some awesome back issues he brought me, he read some of my currents, and we left each other with nothing.

So we’re not sharing comics like we usually do. I’m not sure if we ever will again. This makes me grumpy. I would have little grumpy-ness lines coming off me if I were manga. Also my frown lines would extend off my chin, and I might’ve cried tears the size of my teeth.

Not that he meant anything by it at all. We really did have a lovely weekend, except for the part where I found out I need tons of HEPA filters, and Dust found out he’s allergic to our cats. I did manage to feed him decently, and he polished off most of the rabbit Kati and Michael left. And we went to the puppet museum and scrutinized the Skexis, and had a fun time operating the servo puppet head of Xelas, the Indian goat-man. We also saw Pirates of the Caribbean and ate at the Majestic.

Breakfast at night in a properly greasy place. With a friend, who knows my language and speaks it himself. That’s one of the best things in the world.

But it would have been better if he’d loaned his Swamp Thing, the puppeteering bastard. He knows I'm all about the green man. And I can knock on him about it, because he knows, in the end, we'll trade again. I'm going to be flying alot in the coming months, and I won't fly without comics.

So I'll have Transmetropolitan, and more Hellboy, for a start. And if he wants to play with my toys, he'll have to start sharing his again.