We are our own worst enemy,
It is true, and there is (apparently) nothing we can do about it.
We created specialty stores to sell comics, and therefore made comics a destination, rather than an impulse item.
We created complex, decades-long continuity to build hard-core-returning readership, and limited our audience to those who were already reading, and thus inhibited new readership by requiring them to complex relationships that they could no longer follow.
We developed a distribution network to ensure that books get to the shelves of the specialty stores, and turned it into a monopoly that is now dictating to publishers which books it will cover.
We’ve convinced the public that comics are not just for kids and raised the literate level of the writing itself, and thus turned off the incoming generation of new readers by no longer offering books targeted to new readers.
We have managed to publish “adult” material in a medium long thought of exclusively being for children, then complained when the public is still stuck in thinking comics are for kids.
We have infused mature material into the medium while continuing to pander to an audience that wants to see well-endowed women clad in skimpy spandex.
We are moving forward while being mired in the past.
We are killing ourselves, and there is nothing we can do to stop the train that we are riding.
This is where we live, and for better or worse, this is what we do.
Yet in spite of all of that, or perhaps because of it I remain what I have always been. a heroist. No, not a hero per se but someone who believes in the cult of heroes. I see mankind as a race of people where — given the choice — the best of us will continue to choose to rise and advance our collective spirits.
Since the dawn of time we have told stories of great men and women taking the lead and fighting the good fight. From etchings on the walls of the caves of prehistory, to all in color for a dime packaged in cheap pulp, to digital images wired to our hand-held portable electronic devices. these stories have been told and will continue to be told.
This is who we are, and this is where we live. We are the new Homer and this is our new Odyssey.
Come. Walk with me. For the future begins now.