Every Wednesday, I stop by my friend Alan's comic shop. He and his wife Marsha are such good people. Alan was born in Illinois a few months before I was born in Indiana, so we grew up in very similar environments. We invariably end up reminiscing about some facet of popular entertainment - his business, after all - and waxing nostalgic about the comics we read, the t.v. shows we loved, the movies we saw down at the neighborhood theatre. (Tickets were a quarter, candy a dime.)
Alan remembers when comics were 10 cents; my mother was pretty protective about what I read for a long time, so they were 12 cents by the time I got into them. Comics now are $3.99 and up, and most are pretty dark and convoluted compared with the stuff we were getting in the '60s. When I was a kid, each issue was a one-shot - the entire story was wrapped up in 18 pages, or whatever it was; today, it's all extended story arcs, massive crossover events (designed to make you buy a dozen or more titles in order to get "the whole story") and nothing ever really ends. (At least not until the next universal re-boot, which both of the major comic companies, Marvel and D.C., do every few years now; they pretty much wipe the slate clean and start every title over with "#1", re-invent many of the characters, and leave you guessing about what remains in the new continuity and what no longer ever existed.)