Right in front of the hotel I was staying in this last July, right next to El Burrito, which had the best chile relleno burritos with handmade tortillas I’ve ever had.

And yet they’re not entirely goofy. They’re entirely capable of addressing mental spaces and concepts that are too squirmy and uncomfortable to look at otherwise.

But then there’s the time that they’re simply gloriously, as Mr. Smith recalls in the quote “The future burns all around you, Amazon!” What the hell does that mean? Who knows? Why is Man-Thing a tentacle-faced monstrosity with blank ruby pools for eyes and Alec Holland is almost recognizably human? Same character, only not. What’s the psychic nerve that’s being drilled into, producing not pain but an ecstatic sense of wonder? And why is that largely being discarded.

A friend of mine, sitting in a very much smaller Grant Morrison profile panel at SDCC in 2004, I think, used the moment not to ask a question, but to make a statement. “I don’t know what I’m reading half the time, but I can’t stop reading it.” Now, I don’t know what’s going on maybe only ten percent of the time, but all the same, I can’t stop reading it. Brandon Graham’s work does something of the same thing. So does Paul Pope when he’s really hitting it. Why does everything else make so much damn sense and, consequently is often pretty dull (or callously manipulative in an effort to “mean” something)?

Why indeed?

—

The triple chili-cheese at Tommy’s is unnecessary. Structural integrity starts low and slides from there.

This rental really is no damn good, even if it’s brand-new. Bottom-end is essential in city driving.

AGENTS OF ATLAS #2 is apparently impossible to find in this town.

Kearny Villa Drive is not the same as Kearny Mesa Road.

The sky outside is like the opening to NEUROMANCER, only much brighter.

I know times are tough, but a quarter to go take a leak? Isn’t that against the law? #neverbeentoeurope

This trolley is fuller than it will be on Saturday. #utterlyweird

The professional registration line actually gets worse every year. I’m beginning to suspect that some are fakes.

You could shoot the front of this line in the head and the news wouldn’t get to the tail for more than a week.

Meet under the GREEN HORNET banner? WHICH GREEN HORNET BANNER?

This phone holds a charge like my grandpa could hold a Budweiser.

Floor is busy like a Friday. I’m more than a little afraid. Hold me.

No, you couldn’t make me go in there, not even for a bag full of real money.

DC’s booth is actually less loud. I see that noise ordinance went through.

Dark Horse is giving out bags the color of hazmat suits.

I can’t ever recognize the SCOTT PILGRIM cosplayers.

And where is that pitch-perfect Superman I used to see? I miss that guy.

That’s just a bunch of molecules that kinda looks like a hot dog.

Okay, that golden throne is pretty cool.

This place has its own weather systems. Atlanta in May or Buffalo in February. Take your choice.

It really is a tote-bag economy at SDCC, isn’t it?

Never have people worked so hard for stuff so free.

Cosplayer incidents are down. Waiting in line in costume is apparently hardcore.

Artist’s Alley is mostly deserted. I realize it’s just Wed. but that makes my blood boil.

Oh hey, it’s inappropriate Golden Book guy. Apparently it just started as a joke.

I always felt bad for Fredo.

The Alan Spiegel Fine Arts table is always an island of sanity.

No, I don’t want any of that free stuff.

Yes, you really are very pretty.

No, I still don’t want any of that free stuff.

Thanks anyways.

Everyone keeps asking what my plan is like I’m going up the Amazon. I’m relying on Shackleton-esque luck.

The center of the hall truly is the Heart of Darkness. Just brightly colored, lit and loud.

Oh, so I heard from my editor at REDACTED. So I guess he’ll be here tomorrow. Waiting on follow-on email.

I don’t like waiting. But I promise not to text him in a panic.

The inside of my head feels like a Gary Numan video directed by someone coming off a bender. Angular and muffled.

Hey there, bunch of people I only see on the internet.

It’s been pointed out that my nametag only has my first name on it and nothing else.

I feel as though I should become a recording artist and enter into dispute with my label. For five years.

Does your mother know you’re wearing that shirt?

I can tell I’ve had too much caffeine already.

Who typed out Carla Speed McNeill’s placard? Carla McHeill? Really?

And who designed Artist’s Alley? It’s all a buncha tiny cul-de-sacs. Nobody likes a cul-de-sac.

Tote bag failure in action #1. Seen a lot already re-tied into some other configuration.

I really wanna buy that, but I don’t know where I’d put it.

This room smells like someone murdered a perfume factory in it.

Can’t sleep. Reading THE GODFATHER instead.

Still can’t sleep. Stupid gargantuan Cokes.

Still not asleep even when roomie makes it back.

Pancakes! Still sleepy though.

Splurged for downtown parking and don’t think I regret it.

Already missing a panel I wanted to make. Oh well. Dude probably won’t die before the end of the show.

Oh, hey there’s Pat Mills right there at the booth.

Pat Mills is a surprisingly nice guy for someone who invented MARSHAL LAW.

Conundrum: Yanks love Brit TV above all else. The converse is also true. Who is right?

Never have I said “pardon me” so much in my life.

The giant Boba Fett figure display is pretty cool. Would be cooler if it was IG-88. Or Bossk.

Where is all the INCEPTION junk? It’s no MATRIX.

Whoever said booth babes don’t work is completely wrong.

Oh, okay, I’ll go, even though I don’t really play that game anymore.

And I promised not to do this, but I’ll text the editor anyways. Maybe he’s actually here.

Who doesn’t love a gnome warlock in S3 Gladiator gear? They’re so CUTE.

Oh hey. Editor’s here. Editor wants to talk.

Better yet, editor is going to buy the story. That was an awful long courtship.

Downstairs at The Century Guild, talking to Michael Zulli, Jeremy Bastian and Gail Potocki in turn.

Ms. Potocki is an amazingly talented painter and far more cordial in person than you’d expect.

Sometimes, the darker the subject the nicer the artist. Sometimes.

Going to The Field to celebrate selling a story for actual currency.

Ah, Strongbow. #strongbow

No, not going to any post-con functions. Going back to my room to read and to sleep, maybe in that order.

Personally, this was a weird year into which was thrust the annual gathering of the tribes, the nerd prom, all invectives you can possibly imagine that you could possibly hurl at this endeavour. To which a new one was added this year: “Douche prom.” Yes, it’s coarse and crass and unforgivable, but there’s times that you find yourself stepping into a shoe that happens to fit you perfectly. The annexation by Hollywood and Other Distasteful Media Personages of SDCC continues apace. But it’s what comics seem to want, or it’s emblematic of what comic companies are becoming.

I said last year, at my end-of-the-decade wrapup, that the biggest single story of the time was also the biggest story of the year, that being the October Surprise of Marvel being bought out by Disney, followed rapidly by the the long hand of Warners reminding DC that they’re a subsidiary of Warners. And it continues to be so. Only we now get to see that in the after-hours scene surrounding SDCC. Parties purportedly put on to celebrate comic-related properties or comic companies often to seem to remember to invite everyone but the people who created the comics upon whose backs these new properties are borne wealth undreamed.

Or all-too-easily-dreamed and reaped.

I said reaped, dammit.

So yes, SDCC has become more commercial, more spectacle for its own sake, and not only those, but in a lot of ways, a lot more corporate. Not simply in that people are walking around wearing suits (there’s precious few, actually). But it is more regimented, more secured, more risk-free (minus the Constab 2010 incident). Free items are given out more forcefully, with hawkers working far and away from their home bases, exhorting “come on, it’s FREE!” to pass out their comic samplers and onesheets and trifles. Maybe that’s the economy talking. But you’d think that free would be enough of an enticement as it was. Free isn’t what it used to be.

There was a lot more Hollywood this year. More disingenuousness. More shaking and howdying. More glad-handing and youdaman-ing. Or maybe I’m more sensitive to it. There’s a lot of producers high-fiving themselves that the job got done and not a lot of interest in how good the job actually is.

It was the year that Scott Pilgrim tried to overshadow RED FACTION and maybe didn’t quite pull it off. But even so, he’s got a pretty big row to hoe in terms of expectations generated. True, he’s young, he’s fresh, he’s full of energy and all the kids are down with him on the show floor, but will he live up to the expectations that have been built up? I’m not talking about with the fans, but with the producers. They’re a tougher lot to win over, their knives are sharper, but you’ll never hear the producers bellyaching on messageboards before they start snicker-snacking.

I hope SCOTT PILGRIM outdoes everyone’e expectations. Mr. O’Malley and his team are all talented guys who’ve found a nerve, even it doesn’t happen to be my particular one. But then the only news that made me beside myself with happiness was that Michael Zulli (he of PUMA BLUES and SANDMAN and SWEENY TODD fame) will have a new book out in November. That’s the kind of thing that pleases me. Well that and the bomb dropped that there was going to be an ABSOLUTE WE3 with additional pages by Frank Quitely off of Grant Morrison’s script. Oh, and that there was positive motion in the direction of an eventual FLEX MENTALLO collection. Understand that I’m not happy because I’ll finally be able to read it; I’ve had it for years in multiple forms. However, I’m happy that all the millions of new Grant Morrison fans that have been created by FINAL CRISIS and such will finally get to read a deeply personal and engaging work.

Or it may yet along the wayside not unlike SEAGUY, which was announced to have a third episode eventually, mostly written. I might’ve missed some other nuggets from Mr. Morrison’s panel. Though I did stick around for his answer to the “How old is Batman?” question which served as a launching pad for a pretty direct summation of the metaphysics of fiction, all boiling down to “None of it is real so it doesn’t matter.” Other people can quote it directly. Next time I hear a continuity question that covers anything other than a character’s essential nature, I’m gonna direct people there.

Funny, but I was talking with a friend on Saturday, a game designer for one of the big companies, and he more or less said that “Story doesn’t matter in games, but atmosphere does.” I haven’t decided yet if the same applies to serial comics and characters, but there may be some truth to it.

This also turns towards an interesting moment that came up during the “DC Town Hall Meeting” towards the end of the day on Sunday. Dan DiDio was offering up an argument against Elseworlds titles saying “I don’t want these alternate realities presenting cooler stories than the other eighty comics a month I’m putting out” and he brought up the examples of KINGDOM COME and WATCHMEN, and maybe one other, completely missing the fact that those books are interesting because they’re complete works and not part of an interminable serial. Pretty sure that someone straightened him out on that point, but who knows if it took.

Ah, I’m wandering.

So yes, this was a weird year for SDCC and myself personally. I’m here at San Diego and not back at home where I perhaps ought to be, since I’m staring at a pretty concrete deadline on a big project. At the end of June, I was significantly ahead in terms of finished pages. That’s a damn good thing, since I haven’t had a solid string of work time all July, culminating in the madness that is this annual trip to my once-hometown. If I get home and put out another twenty pages this week, I’ll be just on this side of being behind. But on the bright side, I got word that two projects which had been somewhat up in the air are now landing on the right side of the fence, as it were. More importantly, personal contacts were established/maintained, so perhaps the trip wasn’t a waste after all.

All the same, it would have been nice to have the energy to come back from the show and be able to pound the keys some. Yes, I suppose this is pounding the keys, but this is just blogging, not writing. This is more like typing in the Mailerian sense of the word.

I arrived in San Diego to find it only about thirty degrees cooler than Sacramento, but also about thirty times more humid. It’s hard to remember when this was home, though it wasn’t all that long ago. This is another part of things that make coming to SDCC weird. I go to places I used to, like Tommy’s for a chili burger followed by a trip to Comickaze, but it’s not the same. It’s just not. In that, the furor and hullabaloo of the show floor is welcome, since it’s more the same than it isn’t. There’s some of the same costumes, some of the same superheroes and Captain Kirks, some of the same heroes, even if just for one day.

But Comic Relief wasn’t there, so there I was reminded that Rory isn’t with us still, and now even this part of his legacy isn’t.

Old Con was there, though, as named by a woman wise in this sort of thing. You know Old Con, the banks of comic stores selling (still) overpriced, real collector item comics. They’re still there, and I still paw through the longboxes to marvel over the covers sheathed in plastic like so many Laura Palmers still and blue and lifeless, pretty enough to remind you of what they were in life but still not alive. But I’m not one of those guys who’s going to put down money on those books, not real money anyways. Give me the quarter bins. I’ll buy all kinds of crap for a quarter.

Though I can’t bring myself to stand in line for most of the free comics being offered. Rankly smelling Bronze Age comics, though, still sharp with the smell of pulp acidifying, yeah, I’ll buy all kinds of those. Which is why I was staying away from those bins. I didn’t come down this year to buy a lot of stuff, and mostly I stayed true to that, managing to get away with only a copy of Gail Potocki’s THE UNION OF HOPE AND SADNESS and a few other random trades and something from the Partyka table (which was being shared with Tom Neely, who will indeed destroy you.)

Ms. Potocki’s book is remarkable, and I’m kind of upset with myself that I waited as long as I did to pick it up finally, after having seen it a couple of years ago at Wonder-Con, I think. It’s a darkly gorgeous work, infused with a very quiet power, exploring the axis between memory and knowledge. Heady stuff, but the Century Guild booth always provides a welcome anchor for those like myself wandering the floor.

This year, the layout seems to have been perfected in that if you want comics stuff, it’s easy enough to get to all the comics stuff without going through the movie and television and celebrity stuff, which I more or less decided was the heart of darkness. Albeit a brightly-lit one, pasted over with giant video screens and pumped with absurdly loud and juiced soundtracks and pretty girls handing out free things that I didn’t want in the first place. I’m sure there was a Kurtz there, bald-pated like Brando in APOCALYPSE NOW, bug-eating and heat-drunk, surrounded by a harem of slave Leias, atop a pyramid of properly-boxed toys and custom vinyl figures. I’m just glad I didn’t find him.

So the comics material was easy enough to find, easy enough to stick to without cross-contamination. Though there was still the steady stream of producers and movers and shakers, like great whites in the kelp forest, unseen until you lingered too long for a moment, just a moment. I suppose I should be grateful. Sometimes creators even manage to hit it relatively big with the help of these movers and shakers, but I can’t help but see the contempt that a lot of them walk around, swinging like an absurdly long pachuko pocketwatch.

Figure I should mention that the other big property on the show floor, aside from Mr. Pilgrim was THE WALKING DEAD. It wasn’t inescapable, but it wasn’t going to go quietly into the dark night, either. And hey, the show even looks pretty darn good. Though I was more than a little saddened to see that there wasn’t a single piece of Tony Moore’s artwork attached to any of the promotional material. Half of why people started reading the book in those crucial first months was Mr. Moore’s art, and he did plenty of covers as the book picked up steam, but it’d be hard to figure that out from what you’re seeing on the show floor. Still, that long trailer looks solid. But then so did the footage from WATCHMEN that I saw a couple years ago.

I was also struck on Sunday, after having taken the day off on Saturday to sneak out and visit friends in the County Orange and to see INCEPTION, that there was very little in the way of connection to the number one film in the country. That being INCEPTION, which seems a natural for the Comic-Con crowd. But all there’s been has been a couple of props and costumes and the tie-in comic from Udon. Where’s the synergy?

Sure, there’s room to hype things that haven’t come out yet. In that, SDCC has become E3 writ large. E3, for those of you who don’t know, is the premiere gaming show where companies trot out demos and videos and previews of games that are in progress but not out yet. It’s also an incredibly frustrating business, since it’s nothing but previews and videos and press conferences and precious little new actual content. It’s content to make you want content, but not content in and of itself. Sure, there’s plenty of actual comics to buy and take home, but the announcements are more and more just announcements and not things to be taken away other than in the wanting.

Honestly, I’ve kinda lost my patience for that. So I don’t go to a lot of preview panels. About the only one I went to was the Vertigo panel, which is something of a tradition for me, as I’ve managed to go to most of them since the imprint even started some seventeen years or more ago. What did I see there? I saw announcements for a lot of standalone graphic novels (which is nice) and the continuation of a few stalwart monthly titles, but I don’t recall seeing a huge bolstering of the monthly line. Now, I’ll freely admit that I came in a few minutes into things and maybe I just missed it, but I don’t think I did.

Also interesting was a direct statement that all of the characters from the DCU which had once been the purview of Vertigo, SWAMP THING, SANDMAN, HEX, etc, are all reverting to the DCU. Madame Xanadu might be a holdout. Oh, and John Constantine, who is apparently getting married. No, really. But that’s an interesting turn from the way things were just a short while ago. Vertigo is now a home for original properties and genre stories and literary fictions, exclusively. For the moment. It’s like the last stage of the rocket is separating and there’s some tin-can floating going on. Not that it’s directionless, I don’t believe that for a moment.

And it was funny, but the Vertigo presentation was held in a room the same size that the Grant Morrison panel was, only I think Mr. Morrison’s was better attended. Though I suppose he’s got a much larger audience based on the big crossover series and books like BATMAN AND ROBIN. Still, interesting. He’s just as charming and engaging a speaker as he was back in 2003 when I first saw him speak in a room maybe a quarter the size of that one, or less.

As mentioned way above, I did stick around late for the Grant Morrison documentary movie panel, and it looks to be worth the price of admission, at least for a relatively diehard fan like myself. And he certainly looked like he was having fun rolling with the interviewers. Sure, I’d heard a lot of the stories before, some of them firsthand from Mr. Morrison himself, but there were some patches as yet un-illuminated. Oh, and Chris Weston’s reaction to the first page of THE FILTH script that he was illustrating was absolutely priceless and made the trip up worthwhile.

Mostly, though, the show was a mix of catching up with friends (and the first experience of referring to people by their Twitter handles before learning their actual names in real life – weird), trying to talk with editors (something that I’m truly, epically terrible at) and just getting a sampling of what’s out there on the floor. Honestly, though, I was much more interested in making this a social thing. I can buy stuff anytime. I don’t always get a chance to hang out with net-folk in the meatspace. I don’t always get a chance to talk with Pat Mills (which was truly my major geek-out moment of the show) about the genesis of MARSHAL LAW and how Archie Goodwin was likely horrified by what he’d gotten himself into.

Too many people I saw too briefly or not at all, which is probably my big regret of the show. There were too many “I’ll catch up with you later” moments and not enough sitting down and talking about the ripples and undercurrents of the show. Sure, there was some of that here and there, of the lunchtime parade where people come and go from the table like anthropomorphs coming and going from a mad tea party. I barely had an opportunity to congratulate friend John Layman (and his partner in crime, Rob Guillroy) on their Eisner for CHEW. Hell, I didn’t even see Tom Spurgeon once. I guess he was actually out there doing the work, where I was treating the thing like a gigantic house party, working my way from one end to the other with a red Solo cup filled with foamy beer and trying not to step into anything too sticky.

But I never took the hustling aspect of this work too terrifically seriously. Primarily because I’m not very good at it, and I’d rather spend my time on the work itself. I’m not very good in bars, crowded or otherwise. Can’t write in bars. Would rather be writing. Wapner. Yes. Can’t miss Wapner.

Sorry, RAIN MAN moment. Crowds sometimes do that to me. I’m much better in small groups or with crowds that I can’t see. Like right now for instance. I’ve been told that this is a career shortcoming. No, really. And I suppose it’s no less true than in other businesses I’ve been in, like animation. Personal networking in animation did a lot to get one jobs.

Oh, but I’m digressing. Though I’m not, since a large part of why people go to conventions is to get connected to get work. But I’d just rather do the work. I know. It’s not about what I want, but what people want out of me. Then I get tangled up in this, which is one of the reasons why the run-up to the show is not unlike the day before finals, angst-drenched and uneasy-making. Can’t really help that, just how I ended up being wired, and rewiring is not a trivial process.

But you probably want to hear about the craziness on the floor or how Dan DiDio, who’d rumoredly been very low-key the earlier days was in full Vince MacMahon mode on Sunday at the DC Town Hall Meeting. Which he was. I actually enjoyed coming to these in the past, since they were very low-key operations where people got together and chatted about what DC was doing, how it might be done better, comics in general.

I suspect it had something to do with the addition of Jim Lee, who, sure, is co-publisher of DC, but he’s also still a superstar artist and artists will always fill a room if they’re superstars. So my read on the vibe in here was that it was all very much the DC faithful, regular comic store visitors who really don’t want to see much changed up.

If you’re listening, misters Lee or DiDio, here goes. I have an iPad. I’ve downloaded a handful of titles, mostly free ones or books that I already own and are classics. I haven’t bought any of DC’s new comics because I really don’t like what I’m seeing out there with the exception of BATMAN AND ROBIN and maybe ACTION or SECRET SIX. I already have BATMAN AND ROBIN in singles and there’s no compulsion to buy the digital copies. I bought both ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #1 and BATMAN: YEAR 1 #1 because those are both gold standard superhero comics and I want to have something to show people.

If you have something worth reading, I’ll pay two bucks for it. I don’t care about page turning and holding the physical object in my hand. I don’t think the comic book has any tangible advantage any more, since I can lay out a comic book flat. Gatefold and double page spreads are a non-issue and I wish you’d stop bringing that up as a reason not to adapt to the realities of digital comics. Gatefolds are so rare as to be nearly meaningless. Most double-page spreads are served just fine by turning the damn thing on its side.

Some of the archival material looks very nice, but at two dollars an issue is simply too expensive. Bundle runs. Aggressively cross-market. Build up your readership but most of all, show some patience. You both admitted that its three weeks into things. This a long haul paradigm shift thing. And if you don’t grapple with it successfully, someone else will. But cleaving to the old way of things simply because it’s the old way of doing things isn’t a winning proposition.

Oh, and the guy who said there should be done-in-one adventures of your three marquee characters (and at least one other character to be showcased a month) is absolutely essential. Bring back single-issue stories and consider it a cost of doing business. I’d almost say that you need to listen to Jim Shooter’s advice and remember that every comic is potentially someone’s first comic. It can’t all be six-or-twelve-issue arcs and work.

If you’re insisting on selling line-wide stories, then I can’t help you. I think that’s a crazy-making proposition and will ultimately break the back of your readership at four dollars a chapterlet. Selling the entire line, or even a majority of it at a time is a huge endeavour, but it also limits the choices that you’re going to have in terms of stories and genres. There can’t just be one set of genre tropes and get a wider range of readers. I know, DC does superheroes, but they could do so much more.

SDCC is still a great show, though for the first year I felt like there just wasn’t enough time. I still missed people, still missed opportunities to linger at booths. But then trying to do it all is probably a crazy borderline suicidal business. But what a way to go.

Imaginary twitter stream will follow some other time. I’ve got to get to work on something that actually, y’know, pays. If you were missing the flavor of my previous reports, you might look for some of it there.

Let’s rewind a bit. Forever and ever ago, it was that the only way you could get your comics was to get them in single issues. There were no trades, unless you counted the odd collection that showed up in bookstores or the like. Marvel did several of these through the seventies and eighties before the age of the trade collection even started. And, truthfully, it was one of the ways that I found myself primed to be turned into a Marvel zombie when I hit comics around 1980 or so. ORIGINS and SON OF ORIGINS and BRING ON THE BAD GUYS all served as my basic Marvel primer, and really you could do a lot worse as an introduction to Marvel comics of the time.

So, as a result of that, comics were written to be 16 or 22 page long comic stories. Sometimes they were done in one, oftentimes they were two or three issue long stories (but constructed such that you could leap in even at the last chapter and be more or less up to speed.) Once in a while, you got an entire run which interlocked (sometimes gracefully, sometimes not) into a long story. DOCTOR STRANGE went on like this, after a few rough starts, to form a huge epic. Go read it if you don’t believe me. There’s an uninterrupted story that runs for most of the duration of ESSENTIAL DOCTOR STRANGE v.1. Most famously (at least for myself) was Chris Claremont’s run on UNCANNY X-MEN, which made a long story that you could argue ended at X-MEN #138, though you could easily take the stance that it’s still ongoing. I only had patience for the next hundred or so issues (and momentum played a role in that.)

These are far from the only ones, but they suffice for example’s sake, and at least one of them is fresh in my mind, having spent a good chunk of my recent reading time with the iPad and UNCANNY, issues 94-142, which is what, six years or so of material? And while there’s major digressions in the Claremont/Byrne plot, those issues do form a fairly coherent whole (though the end of it was quite definitely made like a sausage in a bloody and grinding process). Yes, there were plenty of sub-stories or arcs that went on for two or three issues along the way, but even in those, there were constant callbacks to the over-arcing plotline and developments there. New characters were introduced mysteriously and sometimes payoffs were years in the coming. For all of its problems, there’s plenty to learn about longform storytelling there. There’s also an insane amount of information packed into those pages.

And those single issues were the only way to get that information. Which is why I tracked down all the issues I could afford as a kid. I wanted the story (but when you start talking about twenty bucks an issue in 1980 dollars, then I lose my strength of will.)

Now there’s ESSENTIALS and OMNIBII and regular old trade collections of a lot of this material. Completely unthinkable back then. At least it was unthinkable until later in the age of the direct market, and in particular, a little book called SANDMAN, which was one of the first books that you could collect the entire run of *without* getting a single issue off the newsstands. Granted, that wasn’t an instant process. It took a long time for DC to get all the books out, but not that long. In fact, by the time of the third or fourth collection, SEASON OF MISTS, hardcover versions of the comics were being offered within less than a year of the newsstand publication. Now this is as memory serves me. I might be mangling some facts here.

However, there’s no doubt that you could get all of SANDMAN as hardback books within a short time of the series itself ending. This was a very big deal. And it was also exceedingly unusual.  SANDMAN was also unusual in that it was a discrete whole (argue about how successful a whole it was somewhere else, please), sixty-five or so issues coming together as a single work.

In 1994. Not so much today, where it’s unusual that a book isn’t collected, no matter how poorly it ended up doing on the stands. We can talk about leading market expectations and double-dipping all we want to. I’m a little more interested in the changes to story construction. See, another innovation of the early Direct Market age on comics was the introduction of this thing called the mini-series. This allowed for characters to do offbeat stories that perhaps didn’t fit in the larger soap-opera narratives that drove most superhero comics back then (and let’s be clear, most of my knowledge of this era is intertwined with that genre). Now, this isn’t really a good thing if you look strictly quality wise. For every ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, you had a thousand generic and dull minis taking up space.

However, the miniseries did begin to get people thinking about single issues not necessarily as a single issue, but as a chapter of a larger story. Maybe it’s a fine distinction, but it seems like a pretty real one. Mini-series also accustomed readers to expecting a “real” story to be a kind of discrete unit of multiple parts. Mini-series also, by and large, lended themselves to collection more easily, at least the solidly-constructed ones did. Now, we can argue about the portability of say a CAPTAIN AMERICA story of that time, in that there was so much information that needed to be covered to make the character’s motivations understandable in that short amount of story space, but let’s leave that aside for now.

So you have two developments. One, stories being planned to be four or six issues and to stand on their own, separately from the main line that spawned them. Two, books of about six or so issues of material becoming collected and available on their own. Around the turn of the century (yeah, I can say that now), you see a big upswing in the number of collections being offered by the major publishers. Some of this is classic material, but a lot of it is simply every time that the next six issues of whatever series comes out, so does a collection, assuming a story that fits in that slot.

Oddly, a lot of storylines in the monthly comics began to fit into the timeframe of about six months. And here’s where I began to get the feeling that instead of getting a monthly comic, I was getting just a chapter of a story. I suppose I shouldn’t denigrate that, but if the intention is to tell the story over six months, then what’s my impetus to get the latest chapter once a month. Instead, I began to wait for the collections to come out. The wait wasn’t very long, as these things went, and the whole thing would read better for it.

Sure, I made exceptions. I rabidly devoured Grant Morrison’s run on NEW X-MEN as it came out. Same with THE FILTH. Same with SLEEPER. Same with CATWOMAN. Same with several other books, I’m sure. I also ended up getting all of those in trade collections, since they’re a lot easier to re-read that way. Looking at the books that came from longform works, there’s still individual chapters there which are great single issue stories, done in ones, as they used to be called. That’s not so much the case in the collected mini-series, which really are just single chapters.

I guess what I’m getting to is that the single issue really isn’t that. It’s a chapter. It’s not necessarily a little tidbit that’ll pay off in a year or in six months. It’s an act of a story that will be collected in a couple of months. The only reason I’d want to read it RIGHT NOW was so that I could converse about it online, I mean, aside from obvious issues of story quality and the like. And really, I don’t talk about comics on fora online much anymore. The story is being written for the larger collection, so I lose nothing waiting for that collection. The impetus to have it now has cooled to arctic temperatures, for a variety of reasons, but primary among them is that the reading experience won’t be lessened if I wait.

People often puzzle around the question “How do we make monthly comics attractive again?” Part of me thinks that’s an insane question. Why would you even want to, would be my reply. Then my next reply would be to say that you’d need to make comics that demand monthly attention. I have to say, even the comics that I love, I don’t rush out for every month. KING CITY, which is as good as anything that’s coming out now, has become something that I’m waiting on. Yes, I’m a bad fan and I’m killing comics by not rushing out and getting the monthlies. I’ve heard it before. Repeatedly. It was old seven years ago. It’s older now. So maybe it’s impossible for you to devise a comic that I’d rush out to get every month, unless it was something on the quality level of Morrison’s run on DOOM PATROL.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath for that.

Honestly though, even a book like SCALPED, as good as Jason Aaron and R.M. Guéra make that book, and even as surprising and shocking as the single issue standalone stories are, even that book is something that I wait out on trades for. I dunno. Something snapped somewhere. It’s a strange equation, but I’d rather pay twenty bucks for a whole than three bucks for a chapter. I’ll never go back to that chapter again, that single issue. It’ll get read and put in the box. But I’ll read those trades over again from time to time.

The funny thing? I want a book to grab me like that, grab me so hard that I don’t want to wait for it. It hasn’t happened yet. Not lately. That’s probably more a statement of my reading tastes than it is an indictment of quality of the books out there. But wouldn’t that be amazing? To be swept up in a longform epic that didn’t feel like a trade collection waiting to happen? To get that single issue that perfectly illuminates a corner of the book’s world? But I suspect that very construction was due to the newsstand form and now we have a new paradigm for this new market.

And please, let’s not think I’m excusing my own work from this critique. The single issues of STRANGEWAYS would, by and large, not be compelling single issues. They are chunks of a larger whole, since the book was written that way. But I’ll march out and say it. When I hear writers say that they’re not writing for trades, I usually roll my eyes. There are writers who make great single issue comics (which is much harder than you’d think), and great artists to draw them. But stories now are constructed from these chunklets into these chunks. And the chunks are something that I can wait on just fine. The chunklets are something I bypass altogether.

Returned from sudden trip back to the ancestral Maxwell family homeland of Redlands, California. And yes, it was that kind of a sudden trip. Ended up staying longer than I’d intended, but it gave me a chance to catch up with family, offer support and even get a solid day of writing in *and* make a lightning trip into Los Angeles and shoot some pictures. More on that later.

Rounded what I pray to Cthulhu is the halfway point on the current project. It actually should be more than halfway, but I suspect it is right in the middle. Good thing, as it’s due in October and that’s a firm deadline. Much of July will be shambles between an upcoming (planned) family vacation and then SDCC about a week after I get back from Oregon. Once I survive the summer, however, I go back to something resembling a normal, human work-week of six hours a day of uninterrupted work time. Yeah, I’m a weirdo for being happy about this, but after a year of three hours of work time (given my daughter’s schedule).

Will post some pics once I get a chance to winnow through the chaff. But then you probably don’t want to see pictures of overpasses and scrubby, industrial landscapes, do you?

Off to re-read Morrison’s DOOM PATROL, which in so many ways is my ideal comic book. I look at it now and wonder how the hell it even got published.

“WHAT DID I TEACH YOU?”

Oh, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, my love for you, it is not a healthy thing. Though the callous among my critics may accuse me of simple nostalgia, and in truth there is nostalgia there, that is not the whole story. That is not the whole of my love for you, o Manhattan island turned over to ruthless convicts and grimy ne’er do wells.

The nostalgia trip works on some flicks, but ESCAPE shrugs that right off of its shining black zippers at the collarbone shirt. If anything, ESCAPE is just as visually arresting as it was some thirty years ago, where the US was staggering out of the seventies and into the eighties with a hangover and the bill collector screaming on the phone that you’re not only behind in the rent but that it’s all coming due right now. In that, it shares a great deal with the spate of near-future dystopias that populated sci-fi entertainment for the decade before and after. Whereas BLADE RUNNER became the visual template for cyberpunk and everything else, both lush and rich with decadence gone amok to decay, ESCAPE is starker, leaner, meaner. It’s the Stooges’ FUN HOUSE compared to SGT. PEPPER’S. No gentle, candy colored psychedelia, but all black leather and sweat and amphetamines. And mean.

ESCAPE is mean to its core, nihilistic and subversive from beginning to end. It’s where the totalitarian state puts all of its refuse, all the square pegs who refused to have their corners filed off. ESCAPE was black helicopters and faceless riot cops with M-16s long before that was the fashion for the future America, before these paranoid fantasies were run on the six o’clock news on a nightly basis. Before the MOVE bombing and Ruby Ridge and Waco and all those other countercultural Alamos, ESCAPE tossed us into a concrete holding cell and burned our eyes with dazzling anamorphic lens flares, painful and prismatic. There’s no happy smiley-face fascism, so all you Banksys need not apply. No room for you. The only tagging here is empty black lines without either art or soul, fueled by directionless aggression and hate.

I love you, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. I love the trash and the broken windows at your ground floors. I love how the CHUDs come out at night, moving aside manhole covers with scrapes like gravestones on the wet asphalt. I love how the inmates, the baddest of the bad and hardest of the hard, all give the Crazies a wide berth and gives the viewer some nice I AM LEGEND/NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD pursuit and evasion thrills. Where lesser directors would (and probably have) spent an entire movie building up a threat like these guys, John Carpenter just throws them out there and just as fast leaves them on the boulevard, shielding themselves from an alley-full of molotovs.

I love your hippie radicals spouting nonsense right out of an SLA manifesto as they prepare to crash a jet, and not just any jet, but Air Force One, into the island. And yes, that’s an especially unsettling moment anytime after 2001, but even then, even twenty years before then, this is the kind of HOLY SHIT hook that producers work their entire lives for. But then, who’d have imagined that seeing the World Trade Center on the future Manhattan skyline would’ve ever marked an image as either history, fiction, or fervent wish fulfillment? Not us in the eighties, that’s for certain. Even shrouded in wood smoke and dirt and stenches fouler than that, we’re given the skyline as a monument, as spectacle. Though considered more closely, it’s a horrifying spectacle. It was easier for society to walk away from this place, this city, and throw it to the wolves, than to deal with the sicknesses that gnawed at it.

Like I said, subversive. Subversive as any big-budget action movie that you care to name. Just watch the trailer, at about :40 in, you get to see what a CONTROL SITUATION looks like.

Man, if that isn’t a quietly insouciant statement on authority structures, I don’t know what is. But that’s not all. Snake Plissken’s career, ex-war-hero and now ex-bank-robber says quite a lot too. He’s the scion of the state gone bad, reflecting the state’s corruption and ultimately made to do its dirty work. Or at least, so the state thinks.

The President is an ineffectual nebbish, valuable not because of the authority he wields but because he holds vital information. He’s the lamb that others die for, but ultimately (nearly) valueless, at least until he gets a machine gun in his hand and droolingly, falteringly mows down his tormentor, the real power, The Duke of New York. In fact, the first time the audience (thinks) that they see the President inside the prison of Manhattan, he’s being held down, tied to a squalid sink in a reeking basement and being beaten methodically, mechanically. Later, he’s used for target practice. At the end, he goes from near-psychotic revenge-killer to vapid face of the nation, unable to answer the seriousness of the events surrounding him. The Duke (played by Isaac Hayes, rest his soul) knows exactly what and why he’s doing. But then, so does Plissken and all the other men (and women) of action.

I love you, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, for giving Lee Van Cleef another great vehicle to show off his smouldering bad-assedness. He plays Col. Bob Hauk of the US Police Force, and you can tell he got his job by killing a long line of his predecessors. Again, critics will say that “he’s just playing Lee Van Cleef” but that’s exactly what a great character actor does. So stop whining. Even so, even knowing that Hauk has everything planned out and is going to go to any length to get his way, you know that Plissken, the outsider, is going to be a half-step ahead when it matters most. Hauk is a cop who gets driven to work in a stretch limo with wing antenna (which in 1981 meant mobile phone in the car and therefore total and consummate badass), looking rested and ready, like the phantom Nixon who never came back. His entrance out of that limo is outstanding in a movie full of great entrances.

Here, dig The Duke of New York making the scene:

Which brings me to another thing that I love. The soundtrack. ESCAPE, like most of Carpenter’s other movies, featured a music track that he himself worked on. I’m not going to say that he’s the greatest composer ever, but he could do atmosphere. And with ESCAPE, he really hit a sweet spot that was somewhere between Kraftwerk and a kind of minimal biker-bar jukebox, all filtered through the raft of influences that was bubbling under the mainstream in 1980. It’s not fancy music by any stretch. It offers no crazed flourishes like Vangelis’ BLADE RUNNER virtuosity. Again, it’s lean and mean, fitting the look of the film perfectly.

ESCAPE, I love your Ernest Borgnine as Cabby, sitting in the audience for deranged all-male revue with an equally deranged grin on his face as the tutu-clad convicts sing an off-key ode to the city. I love how he listens to the theme from AMERICAN BANDSTAND on a collection of grimy cassettes in his ironclad taxicab, the last one in the city, so far as I could tell. It’s like a ghost of the Manhattan that was, chunky 50s lines, squat and square, not unlike Borgnine himself. And somehow, Cabbie seems to have forgotten that he’s in one of the most dangerous places on earth, instead dispensing advice like “You really shouldn’t be out in this neighborhood at night, this is a bad neighborhood” while tossing flaming gasoline at aforementioned CHUDs, all with a smile on his face.

Now if I’m blatantly nostalgic about something, it’s my love for the titles and graphics used in ESCAPE. There’s nothing that a little Fritz Quadrata and chunky square sans-serif brutalist type can’t fix. Yes, these are the information displays of the future as imagined in the past, so they end up saying a lot about the time they were designed, right? Yes, that’s pure 80s on that black backdrop with the hard-edged single-color graphics, and I love it.

And man, this stuff is happening NOW. Dig that.

I love the nightmare future that isn’t caused by nuclear war or alien annihilation or ecological devastation, but by simple abandonment or careful social planning, depending on how you look at things. Aircraft fuselages in pieces, burning on the streets picked over by human scavengers. Spy technology that the inmates can’t use so they destroy it, because it’s the only thing they know how to do. Oil drills and pumps in the middle of the NY Public Library, valuing practical energy over esoteric knowledge. Family cars with crossed rebar instead of windows. A dazzling array of glasses on thugs’ faces, all of them broken or incomplete. The street using things, but not high-tech dressed up in grit and grime, instead feeling like these things were actually scrounged and cobbled together. The only glamour comes in on the totalitarian police side of things. They get the sexy gear, the shiny plastic, the oiled weapons. The cons? They eat that stuff for lunch.

In terms of story, what isn’t there to love about ESCAPE? It manipulates simple absolutes. The worst place in the world. The shining beacon of freedom. The good guy gone bad. A ticking clock that won’t be denied. And inside it all, the secret that will keep the world in peace instead of burning in nuclear fire. And what happens to that secret? The “good guy” chucks it, knowing that the society he’d just saved (and his friends had paid for with their lives) was unsalvagable, irredeemable. Carpenter would revisit this point in ESCAPE FROM LOS ANGELES (which I haven’t seen in ages, but never felt like it had earned the kind of admiration that ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is given.) Revisit, but not surpass. I love ESCAPE because it’s a no-holds-barred (particularly not the nail-studded club to the back of the head) action movie with a brain and a stone-cold heart that doesn’t back down from the edge that it’s marched you out to.

The greatest city in the United States is turned into a dumping ground for the worst of the worst. The President is being held hostage by a man who would release this torrent of human refuse back into the world. Our only hope for survival comes from a man who doesn’t give a damn until his life is dragged out on the line. The future is so dark that your shades are useless. Every cop in the US Police Force won’t make a difference, no matter how many helicopters and how many missiles they fire. It all comes down to two men fighting in the ring, as barbaric as barbaric gets.

They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Luckily, they don’t have to. We already have an ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. And I love it. If I could, I’d drive it out in a Cadillac and show that it was right about humanity, about the future. I’d give it a tour of that part of LA, you know, south of downtown where cars drive along Townsend and pretend that there aren’t tents to either side of the road. I’d take it to the aircraft graveyards outside Pima. I’d give it photostreams of cities going feral and the walls being built to encyst them and keep the rest of the world clean. We’d dine the last bluefin wrenched out of the Pacific and I’d play XTRMNTR at top volume with the top down past the Carson Gas Works and breathe in the byproducts and the smog and the smell of algae baking in the riverbed.

Like this stuff here. Which is the DC Comics app for the iPad and phone.

I’m downloading it now. My understanding is that DC has been pretty aggressive about releasing recent comics. I have to admit that I don’t keep up on the numbers that religiously to know at a glance. Looks like they have some famous runs lined up, “Hush”, “Batman: Year One” and some of the Morrison Batman, Sinestro Corps War, a couple of Vertigo titles, SANDMAN in particular.

Funny thing is, nobody was talking about DC having a digital initiative ready to hit the ground. Or maybe I’m just not paying attention. That could be.

However, this does mean that both of the Big Two are now officially putting pinkie toes, if not entire feet into the pool. But who will jump in along with them?

And yes, it appears that the ComiXology front end is being used to drive the DC online shop. ComiXology won the comics platform war. Seemingly without firing a shot. All I can say is good for them, because even on the iPhone, they handled things in a natural and easy-to-use manner. On the iPad, it’s even better.

Title by Neko Case. Picture by me.

So yeah, why not fire it up again? Why not indeed. Where did we leave off? Isn’t this where we came in?

Oh yes, four dollar books. Four dollars for a chapterlet. And they wonder why the run of the mill title is shedding readers? Because the value isn’t there. Yeah, I’ll cross the street and be happy to pay four bucks for a four dollar Grant Morrison Batman book. But not for a chunk of personal drama masquerading as a superhero comic. Talking while punching? That can be fun. Talking over coffee or wine in the kitchen or living room? Yeah, I guess it’s important because we’re being told it’s important. Pass.

Four dollars for CRIMINAL? Yeah, sure. Four dollars for CURSED PIRATE GIRL or KING CITY? No problemo.

Okay, that’s that horse beaten. Good comics don’t cost too much. Average comics cost way too much. Crap comics always cost too much. There. Done. Moving along.

Like where the hell have I been? Where’s that second STRANGEWAYS book?

Second STRANGEWAYS book, entitled THE THIRSTY is done. Pages are laid out. Lettering probably needs to be tweaked. I’ve had an editor go through the book and make sure that everything actually made sense (something that I didn’t do with MURDER MOON, and in all likelihood didn’t need to do here, but I was doing some stuff with storytelling choices that I wanted to make sure worked and didn’t read like every other panel was missing, as FINAL CRISIS came off reading like.) I’d love to tell you all that there’s publisher interest in it and when it’s coming out. But I can’t. Mostly because the time and energy to work on a job that has only cost money and time and energy isn’t there right now. And when it comes to dealing with potential publishers, it’s all time and energy. Yes, I know, if the work was so good that they couldn’t say no, then, well, they couldn’t say no. So write better comics, Maxwell. Yeah, tautology is fun. So are self fulfilling prophecies.

That said, yes, I’m working on alternate publishing. If, however, it doesn’t work out shortly, then I’ll in all likelihood do a small print run and an offering in the Direct Market. No, there’s no guarantee Diamond will take it now, not without a brokered publisher behind the book. This is not a flounce or a cry or a whine. This is a fact. Though honestly, as much fun as selling at shows can be (and yes, it can, with some notable exceptions), paying for your table and travel and food and lodging is a tricky proposition at best. And, as with most everyone, money doesn’t exactly grow on trees. But it can be had, with some work.

Which brings us to the second point. I’m doing a lot more work outside of comics than inside comics currently. Though I have written a story for a weird western anthology title, but I don’t think I should name it yet. I’ll wait for official word to come down and let me know when I can. It was a ten-page story that wanted to run to twelve. Probably should’ve, but it’s good discipline to make it all fit in ten and still try to make it work. Only my editor can tell you if I’ve succeeded; he hasn’t contacted me yet.

The other thing that’s currently torturing me, you might get a hint of if you search for the #glamheroes tag on Twitter. Or maybe the API has been exceeded again and all of them have been blown away. Anyways, that’s related to, of all things, a Big Two franchise that I’ll in all likelihood never get my hands on. I’m tempted to post the damn thing just to exorcise it, but in my heart of hearts, I think that it’s just weird enough to have a shot of actually being done some day. So I’ll hold onto it like the spun gold that it is. And honestly, you’d laugh if you knew what it was.

The third thing in the hopper has been a short story for a game company that’s been a loooong time in coming. And here I’ve just found out today that revisions were sent out some three weeks ago. Only I never received them. Nor did I receive them on the machine that I had to use while my main machine was in the shop having its video card replaced (most distressing to have the thing lock up and put out a chattering checkerbox of blown-out pixels instead of my beloved desktop. At any rate, I went from having a month to do revisions to having about ten days to turn revisions around. But I’ve still got the job, so I’m thanking the Users.

Fourth thing in the hopper is a novel without pictures. Just prose. Probably four hundred and fifty pages of it. I’m just under halfway-through by length (though the outline tells me that I’m a little over a third done–which is scary.) Good news? I’ll make a decent dime off it. Bad news? It’ll go out incognito. But it’s a hell of an experience so far. Just don’t ask any other questions about it, ’cause I won’t answer them.

With any luck, I’ll be able to write some more comics or oversee some more comics by October. That’s with me surviving the summer and my kids being home all day first. This is not a given at this point. I’m up and writing before they are and likely back to writing after they’re asleep. Not an optimal schedule, but it’s the one that’ll have to work right now.

I might even blog a bit more, just to let off steam. I may, just as likely, wander off and forget all about it.

Maybe.

This thing has been coming for a long time now. Don’t act all surprised. Particularly when the corporate management of Marvel basically said that their audience was inelastic, and even given a drop of say twenty percent, the thirty-three percent jump from three dollars to four would yield a net profit (and maybe even shave a little cost off printing and distribution.) If you’re counting beans, this is a no-brainer.

If you’re trying to expand the market for reading comics, it’s not such a swift move. But then, single-issue-comics haven’t really been able to make inroads into increased audiences, have they? So if you’re trying to maximize profits and you understand that the profit center isn’t the monthly books, then yeah, let the monthly books languish a bit while you squeeze the audience harder. Reading over Tom’s piece on the recent price threshold, I nod my head and agree that raising prices and not adding any perceived value in a time when the economy is putting the bite on everyone will do nothing but reduce the numbers of regular comics readers (at least in the DM.) Profits might edge up, but numbers go down.

My biggest problem with the current pricing structure and presentation also reflects Sean’s position that when I’m buying a comic today, almost without exception, I’m buying a chunk of a story. An act. Maybe even just a long scene. A part. A piece. Not a whole thing. Sometimes that’s okay. And sometimes that’s just a completely unsatisfying experience. Given that almost everything is collected now, I usually just wait. There’s almost nothing that demands my attention in such a way as I have to go buy it right then. But I’ll buy SCALPED nearly as soon as it comes out in trades. The single issue is no longer the main product. It’s a big piece of the publication puzzle, but it’s not the whole piece. It’s a piece of the story, but it’s not a whole piece.

And at four dollars per piece, there’s precious few stories that really move me to put up with the inconvenience of going to a store six times over six months to buy the whole thing. Part of that is dissatisfaction with much of the stories in general. Part of that is dissatisfaction with the way they’re packaged. Part of that is the price. Honestly, I guess I know how people will shell out however much it cost to get most of the story cloud of BLACKEST NIGHT, but I’ll never be one of those participating in the story in that manner.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve talked about the loss of disposability, how comics went from something that cost not a lot, and you wouldn’t feel bad about rolling them up in your pocket or laying your copy of DAREDEVIL 171 on the grass while you played tag with friends from the neighborhood. (Nevermind that you didn’t have to make a special trip to get the comics in the first place and could get them at the drugstore.) The whole of the direct market basically enshrines the concept of preciousness over disposability. People (not me) order their comics three months in advance. They dance around spoilers on the internet. They get bags and boards at the cash register. Sure, a lot of these people will complain about a price hike, and some will silently continue buying them. They’re hardcore. You can always depend on the hardcore sticking around and playing the game.

Until they don’t. And a lot of them will just stop or will keep whittling down until they’ve effectively stopped.

Not everyone wants to be hardcore. Sometimes people just want something to read. Make it hard enough and they won’t want to read comics as presented by the DM. For four dollars, most single issues offer no “hand” (as coined by Brian Hibbs), meaning no weight, no feel. They don’t satisfy, because they’re incomplete, for a variety of reasons from widescreenosity, to being decompressed, to being written for the trade, because they value moments instead of stories. I won’t get into content, as that’s a whole other set of issues, but that’s a very real consideration.

The market wants to make more hardcore, habitual readers. That’s what it’s evolved to. The hardcore will pay for a four dollar ticket. Everyone else will end up getting shook out. Or going digital. Or simply finding something else. Or maybe, if publishers are lucky, buying trades, assuming they can make that leap and be patient enough. This, however, is not a move that will get anyone new reading any more comics, which as I’ve said and continue to do so, is the single most important issue facing the format today.