I have no desire to enforce my tastes on any of you. If I ran a comic store I’d be pushing Bone and Cerebus and Love and Rockets, Sandman Mystery Theatre and Animal Man, Madman and Cages, Yummy Fur and Peepshow, Gregory and Groo—to pick a very few examples from the stuff I happen to like.

I’m not telling you to push those titles, although I wouldn’t mind if you did.

I want you to push the stuff you think is good. Push good children’s comics to children, and good superhero comics to people who like them, and good grown-up comics to adults.

I’m really just asking you to think of comics as a reading material. Think of comics as an entertainment. Think of comics as stories.

You aren’t selling investment items. You’re selling dreams.

Never forget that.

Comics are for reading and enjoying, like tulips are for planting and blossoming and appreciating.

And the next time someone tells you about comics as the hot investment item of the nineties, do me a favor, and tell them about the tulips.

A speech I gave at Diamond Comic Distributors’ tenth annual retailers seminar in April 1993. Delivered to a room filled with comics retailers at the statistical height of the bubble. It was barely applauded by a room filled with otherwise happy people, and I heard later that a lot of the retailers thought it was in bad taste. Which was a pity, because a year later the world of comics entered a recession it took almost a decade to get out of, and most of those people lost their livelihoods and their stores over the next few years. It gave me no pleasure to be right.

A Speech to Professionals Contemplating Alternative Employment, Given at PROCON, April 1997

To begin with, a confession. I hate writing speeches. When I was asked to give this one, my immediate thought was that maybe I could give a speech I’d already written, and no one would notice. Unfortunately I’ve only ever written one speech before, which I gave in the spring of 1993, and which compared the “investors boom” then going on with the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip craze and warned an audience of assembled retailers that if this kept on there was going to be trouble. And while events unfortunately proved me right, I really didn’t think that I’d get away with repeating that speech today.

When I was originally asked to come here and deliver the keynote address, I declined. I said I’d feel embarrassed and out of place. Right now—for the last fifteen months, in fact, since I finished writing Sandman—with the exception of a couple of short stories, I’ve stopped writing comics.

I told the person who phoned me that I’d feel like the kind of girl who dropped out of high school under dubious circumstances and was now returning, in a pink Cadillac, with big blond hair and far too much makeup, to give a graduating speech on the value of sticking to it and hard work.