But I remain optimistic. While Frank Miller’s film of Sin City isn’t as powerful as his comics, it was still his vision up there on the screen in the film he made with Robert Rodriguez, uncompromised by the change from one medium to another. MirrorMask is Dave McKean’s film from first frame to last, visually and musically. Nearly twenty years after the first Batman film, I realize that film doesn’t confer legitimacy on comics. But it’s still an awful lot of fun.

This was originally published in the March 3, 2006, issue of The Guardian.

V

ON COMICS AND SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THEM

“This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it’s the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.”

Good Comics and Tulips: A Speech

I gave this speech at the Diamond Comics tenth annual retail seminar. It was April 1993, and the world of comics was at the height of an unprecedented commercial boom.

I want to talk about comics. I want to talk about good comics, and why you should do what you can to sell more of them.

But first I want to talk about tulips.

I’m often asked—via letters to the editor and at signings—to suggest interesting books to the world, or assemble a reading list.

Well, one of my favorite old books is a remarkable volume called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written almost a hundred and fifty years ago by a gentleman named Charles Mackay.

In it he details many of the pursuits, wise and otherwise, to which people have devoted their lives: he devotes chapters to such diverse subjects as, for example, alchemists, haunted houses, the slow poisoners, the great Louisiana land swindle, and the popular street cries of Victorian London.

It’s a book with a huge cast of characters within its pages that includes, for example, Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, who wandered around England in the early 1640s, finding witches. He charged each village twenty shillings for the privilege of having him turn up and make them all feel uncomfortable, and another twenty shillings a head for each witch discovered and disposed of, and was turning a merry profit, finding witches and sending them to meet their maker, until one day he went to find witches in a little village in Suffolk, the elders of which, who were nobody’s fools, pointed out to him that no man could find as many witches as he had unless he was getting his infernally accurate information straight from Beelzebub, and before Hopkins could come up with an adequate response for this, he was put to the test, and was a former Witchfinder General.

The moral of which, I suppose, is that it can be unwise to start witch hunts, and also . . .

But I didn’t come here to tell you about witches, who after all have little enough to do with the vitally important business in front of us, which is that of comics and the retailing thereof.