“Well,” he said, “it lacks balance.”

“In what way?”

“These comics.” He paused, then spat it out. “You seem to think they’re a good thing.”

He’d been hoping for something that Fredric Wertham would have been proud of, and that wasn’t what he got.

Well, we agreed that I had no plans to rewrite it in order to give it the balance he felt it lacked, and he sent me a kill-fee for the article that was twice what I got for getting articles printed anywhere else. And I would rather have had the article printed. Because I do believe comics are a good thing.

If I didn’t, I’d still be a journalist, or I’d be writing unproduced screenplays for mind-boggling sums in Hollywood, or growing tulips.

We’re living in what the Chinese curse described as interesting times, and I like that.

The landscape is changing, erupting, exploding. New lines and titles and universes appear and vanish, some comics are selling in numbers undreamed-of in 1986, stores spring up like mushrooms after a heavy rain.

It’s hard to tell what things will be like in five years’ time. But I’ll tell you this: stores that sell and push good comics will still be around. Because people who read will still be with us, and they’ll still want comics.

Another flashback: Philadelphia, 1990, and I’m attending a small American convention. It was followed by a meeting of the CBRI, Comic Book Retailers International, and I was asked to stay on and be on a panel discussion.

The panel discussion consisted of marketing reps from all the major publishers of the time, someone from Diamond, someone from Capital, and, right down at the end, more than a little bemused, was me.

So first of all everyone talked about bar codes on comics, and I learned more than any human being would ever wish to know about bar-coding comics. And then they talked about other things, racking, and pricing, and bar codes again—and I began to wonder just what I was doing there.

Steve Gursky, who was presiding over the whole shebang, might have thought the same thing. “We have a creator here, remember,” he told the assembled retailers. “Does anybody want to ask the creator anything?”

There was no sea of hands, no forest of waving arms. Just some puzzled faces. Eventually someone took pity on me, and asked a question.

“As a creator,” he asked, “what’s the difference between creating high-ticket items and low-ticket items?”

I suppose he wanted to be reassured that I was putting that extra three or four dollars’ worth of verbs and adjectives into the high-ticket items. I don’t know.

“There’s no difference,” I said. “What I try to do is write good comics.” There was a silence and, made bold by this, I added, “And I wish that you people would do more to push good comics.”

Three hundred retailing eyes looked very puzzled indeed. Many of these are retailers who’ve since come up to me and told me proudly of the efforts they’ve made since then in that direction, and the success they’ve had.