Return of the Nerd

A couple of days ago my work treated my team and me to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. It was pretty tasty, especially the key lime cheesecake I had, but to my surprise, across the street was a Night Flights Comics store. While I've been to Hasturs, a place loaded with comics, it also has lots and lots of board/card game stuff there too. This place is strictly comic books and related items. Wow, I had a geek overload. I spent probably an hour in there looking at various titles, back issues, trade paper backs, omnibus collecitons and much much more. I really wanted to buy something but I haven't bought a new comic book in almost 8 years. I stay kind of up to date on comics by reading wikipedia but when confronted with comics hot off the press I have no idea what's going on. And to catch up on the stories I'd need to buy several back issues, but the stories I was interested in didn't have all of them, so dispondantly I was ready to leave there empty handed when I saw a new Spider-Man magazine. It's almost 100 pages of old and new stories with Spider-Man, FF4 and others. I bought it mostly as something I can read with my kids, but also to satiate the comic book nerd in me to read something new. With all the comic book movies coming out this year (the Hulk just came out yesterday) I've been jonesing to get back into it, but then I remember that in my hayday I was spending $20 a week on comics, and most of those have about doubled in price. You can subscribe to all the Marvel comics online for about fifty bucks a month, which isn't too bad of a price if you're a big reader/comic-bookphile.