Prose has its advantages. You can give it to relatives without worrying about hearing “Oh . . . I don’t . . . read comics . . . dear.” You can buy it in airport bookstores. Book companies are more prone to advertise outside the comics world than comics publishers are. But for anyone who’s doing this because they want to collaborate, comics are more fun.

Radio—I love radio drama. For a writer it’s strangely close to comics: in one medium you’re telling a story with pictures, in the other you’re writing for everything but pictures. It’s close to your vision, it’s cheap, it’s easy, there isn’t any radio drama in America and the only way I could afford to do it regularly in England is by sending my children out to dance for pennies on the streets. It’s also not a medium I particularly recommend for artists who don’t write.

So those are my words of wisdom on the media outside comics.

Now for my decades of wisdom on the world inside comics.

So here, in no particular order, are the things I’ve learned.

1. Big is not necessarily bad. Small is not necessarily good.

Comics creators are an individualistic, unique and bolshy lot. A punch line of a comic I wrote once was “Try getting a thousand cats to agree on anything at the same time,” and cats are pushovers compared to comics creators. They do not organize, do not trust organizations. It’s a wonder as many of you are here, as are here. Certainly every shade of opinion, politics and belief is represented.

It used to be—it may still be—an item of belief in comics that all organizations are inherently dodgy. And that where companies are concerned, smaller is inherently better. Independence, however that’s defined, is vital.

And if you’re a Dave Sim or a Jeff Smith, your own publisher and a fine artist and writer, with complete control over your own destiny, then you have independence, or as much independence as the market will allow you.

Corporations are huge, slow, stupid lumbering things with brains in their tails. This may be true, but they do appear capable of learning, and changing.

You are no more likely to get screwed over by a huge company than you are by a small one. I’m not saying you won’t get screwed over. I’m saying that there is no moral imperative towards smaller companies not screwing you.

This really is something it took me ages to learn. I kept doing projects or books for small, more independent companies because it seemed like the right thing to do, and because I was convinced that, in my case, DC Comics was a monolithic and ultimately evil organization that was just waiting for me to lower my guard before they screwed me like they screwed Siegel and Shuster.

It didn’t happen. DC were easily the most amenable to reason, accessible, and financially reliable of all the publishers I’ve dealt with. Which is not to say there was not and sometimes still isn’t a great deal of frustration in dealing with some of the departments at DC. But it is to say that their royalty statements arrive on time, are comprehensible, and if one notices something bizarre, one is encouraged to phone the accounting department, who will either explain to you what they’re doing, or apologize for having messed up and fix it.