You know what? I'm gonna take this as an opportunity to ramble about piracy.
"Piracy is bad, yada yada."
Alright. We can agree on that.
But—and I'm sorry if this comes across as offensive—that position often comes from a place of privilege.
And not just economic privilege.
I live in a country where American comics are not always easy to find, and in many cases they're never translated or published at all.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about some mythical "third-world country". I'm talking about a perfectly ordinary European country where the comics I like simply aren't considered profitable enough to distribute.
I remember digging through obscure websites back in 2006 just to get a glimpse of The New Teen Titans. It was a nightmare, but somehow I managed to read the whole thing anyway.
It took me seven years to get a legally published copy of Blackest Night: Titans. SEVEN. Thank God for piracy, because it gave me immediate access. Otherwise I would have been the only idiot trying to discuss Black Lanterns in 2016.
Why? Because Titans comics are considered niche here. Shops don't stock them. Publishers often don't translate them. And when they do, sometimes the translation is... let's politely call it "creative".
(I'm still trying to recover from the translated version of Last Will and Testaments...)
You wait years, pay more, and occasionally get a worse product. Wonderful.
The only reason Blackest Night: Titans was eventually published here, as far as I can tell, is that Blackest Night was such a massive crossover event that leaving out an entire tie-in would have created a noticeable hole in the collection.
And don't even get me started on the Wolfman/Pérez era. That only became legally accessible here in the 2010s.
So yes, this might come as a shock to some people, but piracy is not always about being cheap.
Sometimes it's about access—because access is not distributed equally.
If a comic is unavailable in your language, unavailable in your country, unavailable digitally, unavailable physically, and unavailable second-hand at anything resembling a reasonable price, then "just buy it" stops being a solution and starts being nothing more than a slogan.
And for many international readers, piracy is the reason they became comic fans in the first place.
Peace out and read comics.
If you can, buy them, too.
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