I’ve been planning (loosely planning) this thing for a while now. It’s the 30th anniversary of The Hernandez Brothers’s Love & Rockets, and I was going to check them out and write about them from a beginner’s POV. Partly out of guilt, I think — I’ve never read any Love & Rockets, and my first Los Bros book was Sloth, which I found sort of weird and impenetrable at the time.

Almost right after I came up with this plan, Fantagraphics announced that they’d be doing digital versions. Awesome. I’m running on empty when it comes to space, and I don’t need 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 books or however many stinking up the spot and leading to my eventual death-by-falling-books. So I backburnered my plans for a couple months and waited.

The one thing I didn’t expect was that they’d put the digital books up for full retail. There’s just two right now, Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic, both marked volume one. Other than figuring out what order to read these in, I’ve got to choose whether or not to pay full retail for a digital comic that I do not legally own and cannot download or to order Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic off Amazon for twenty bucks (ten bucks cheaper!) instead and get rid of something else to find space. I’ll also have to spend time scanning those, which I think dissolves the value of the savings. I’ve also got to figure if spending 30 bucks to make 50 makes economic sense (it doesn’t, I don’t think, especially when you factor in time spent reading + writing) or if I should just go about my business and find something else to write about.

It’s not a big deal, but it’s kind of a weird (and disappointing) high-wire act. “I want to do this thing, but I can’t make it make sense for me to do. So do I buckle or do I leave?” I don’t know the answer yet.