And instead the rest of the world stared blankly at the Dutch for fussing foolishly after something that was, after all, only a tulip.

The entire economy of the country of Holland was destroyed. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. There was a madness and a foolishness here that seems pretty apparent to an outside observer.

I am reminded of the time the South Sea Company infected all England with the joy of investing.

At the height of the craze, the so-called South Sea Bubble, share certificates traded hands down a London alley, going up in value as they went, until, one day . . . well, people were wiped out. Fortunes were lost, and a lot of people were made very miserable.

At least the Dutch could eat the tulip bulbs.

And if you think this has nothing to do with you, well, it does. Too many comic stores are trading in bubbles and tulips. I’m not here to play Cassandra. I don’t have the figure or the legs. I merely point this out.

Personally I think any comic shop that sells multiple copies of the same comic to any child under, say, sixteen, because that child has somehow been given the impression that he or she has just been handed a license to print money, should, if nothing else, get the child to read a form explaining that comic values can go down as well as up, and require it to be signed by a parent or guardian.

I think any organization or store that pushes comics as investment items is at best shortsighted and foolish, and at worst, immoral and dumb.

You can sell lots of comics to the same person, especially if you tell them that they are investing money for high guaranteed returns.

But you’re selling bubbles and tulips, and one day the bubble will burst, and the tulips will rot in the warehouses.

Which is why I want to talk about good comics.

I have a vested interest here: I write, or try to write, good comics. I don’t write collectibles, nor do I write investment items. I write stories, the best I can: I write stories for people to read.

But before I wrote comics I was a journalist. Like writing comics, journalism is another profession that doesn’t involve getting up in the morning. And I used to write, whenever people would let me, about comics.

A little digression, here: back in 1986 I was commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine, in England, to do a feature article on comics. I interviewed a number of people for it—Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Dave Sim, Brian Bolland, and many others. I worked incredibly hard on it—this was going to be the first major national article promoting comics as a medium in England.

I sent the article in to the gentleman who had commissioned it, and heard . . . nothing. Not a sausage.

So, after a couple of weeks, I rang him up. He sounded oddly subdued. “How’s the article?” I asked. He told me that he had a problem or two with it. I suggested that he tell me what the problem was. I could rewrite it, get it better.