Dave of YACB recently wrote of having too many comics to read and not enough time – he has three short boxes of floppies he hasn’t read yet, not to mention the trades and manga waiting to be perused. I can’t remember where he said it, but I’m sure that Augie (of Pipeline fame) has said something similar, having boxes of comics and trades to read.

Firstly, this makes me think they have too much money and an obsessive need to own everything (I’m joking). How can they afford to buy so many comic books that they can’t even get around to reading them? Unless they are still working late in order to pay for all of them – comics are expensive.

The second thought that hits me is, ‘How do you stop yourselves?’ This is because I devour my comics when I buy them (not literally, that would be hideous) – I don’t get to the comic shop every week, so I have a pile waiting for me when I get there, and I can’t wait to start reading them. I LOVE new comics – all those new stories waiting for me to absorb, I have to slow down my reading in case the speed of it sets the pages alight.

This could be to do with me – I do read fairly quickly (not as quickly as Clandestine Chum Greg or writer/broadcaster/renaissance media man Andrew Collins, who seem to be able to blink at a book and be enough to read it) and always have. I once went to a speed-reading class in order to get through the many scientific articles required for the postgraduate student to stay on top of his field and write a thesis, and was told that I was already moving my eye across the page twice as fast as the average reader.

In fact, I never have enough to read, comics or otherwise. I’m lucky in the respect that my commute to work allows me about two hours of pleasure reading a day, where I read trades and novels; the only thing that can’t keep up is my wallet, so thank goodness for libraries. I would love to be able to buy more comics but realise that it is an expensive hobby (I get about 15–20 books a month, not including a trade here or there) and that I have limited funds and storage space: the loft already contains approximately 6000 comics and trades. So, for somebody to have piles of reading material that they have bought just sitting there, teasing them with the joy of their untold narratives, just boggles my mind …

The only thing that I can compare with this is the stack of video tapes (and now recordings on my PVR) of films off the television that I want to watch but haven’t yet done so – I have a huge taste and appetite for cinema, but I know that I can’t inflict all of that upon my long-suffering girlfriend. And at least I didn’t pay for them; although, saying that, I do have a large DVD collection as well …

Talking of books and films – the news is official: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be split into two films. I can see the logic in needing two films to fit everything from the book into cinematic form, but I don’t like the fact that it is just a money-making decision on the part of the studio. It was the same with other films (Kill Bill and the Death Proof/Planet Terror split in this country – interestingly both Miramax) and I can see no sufficiently good excuse for it in this case. There is a lot to get through in the final book of the series, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be judiciously pruned to make a 3-hour film, which would be more satisfying.

To add insult to injury, they’ve got David Heyman filming them as well – as I’ve said before, he did a good if unexciting job on The Order of the Phoenix, and I believe the final film needed somebody to make it really special (I would have loved Alfonso Cuarón, based on The Prisoner of Azkaban, but would have been equally happy with the suggestion of Guillermo Del Toro that had been rumoured).

Honestly, it’s enough to make a man wait for the DVD …