The Deluxe Extended Version of this post will be released in time for Christmas

So I'm reading Chris's Invincible Super-Blog, which I just recently added to my sidebar, and which I should've added a long time ago, because Chris is smart, funny, and he adds alt text to his pictures for bonus humor just like I try to do (if you've never noticed this before, well, now you know; scroll over the pictures on my sidebar for examples). And I see this.

It's the very last item in that post, about the trade paperback for The Middleman, a tremendously entertaining comic I enjoy the hell out of. The paperback collects the four issues of the second mini-series. But it also includes, per Chris: Three new stories ("Tales of the Middlemen" stories by guest creators) and a few pages of bonus material.

That is HORSESHIT. It's things like that which make me glad I'm killing the comic book industry (as I mentioned in my last post) with my recent switch to waiting for the paperback collections instead of buying the individual issues. What incentive do I have to support comics companies on a monthly basis by purchasing the floppies, when they're going to try to force me to double-purchase the product by including extra material in the trade? They're doing the same thing the DVD people love to do, creating bonus material to try to force multiple purchases of the same item -- which version did you buy?

Hell, you can find the same thing in the (non-comic) book industry, too. I just bought the paperback of Bruce Campbell's Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, which contains a significant amount of new material not in the hardback (as did his previous book, If Chins Could Kill). And now I find, via his blog, that John Hodgman has added 20 extra pages to the paperback version of his excellent The Areas of My Expertise. God DAMN, that pisses me off. I shell out the twenty-thirty bucks for a hardback book, and now you try to make me buy the paperback, too?

Screw you, John Hodgman. Screw you, DVDs. And screw you, comic books. I'm sick of this shit. As an Average Joe fan, with significantly less than unlimited cash resources, I give you my money for your product, and instead of thanking me for it, you punish me for not waiting for the for reals, super-duper, bonus-filled version to be released? And you wonder why people pirate this stuff off the internet.