Critics will grumble. Of course they will. That’s one of the functions of critics. As an artist it’s your job to give them ulcers, and perhaps even something to get apoplectic about.

Most of the things I’ve got right over the years, I got right because I’d got them wrong first. It’s how we make art.

As a keynote speaker last year for the Eisners I said that compared to where I dreamed that comics could be, as a young journalist in 1986, we’re in a Golden Age.

And I was taken to task in certain circles for this, as if I’d said that this was as good as things could get, or that there was nothing at all wrong with the world of comics. Obviously neither statement is true.

We’re in 2004, the year that Dave Sim and Gerhard finished the three hundred issues of Cerebus, the year that Jeff Smith completed Bone, both monumental tasks, both unique. Cerebus cannot be compared with anything anyone else has done. It’s unparalleled in its evolving portrait of its subject and its subject’s creator. Bone is, beginning to end, the best fantasy tale anyone’s told in comics. That in itself gives me hope for the future.

It’s the year that my daughter Maddy discovered Betty and Veronica, and that gives me another kind of hope. Any world in which a nine-year-old girl can become, off her own bat, a mad keen comics collector because she cares about the stories, is a good one.

I think the Internet is changing things.

Twice in the last eighteen months the Internet has been used as a way of rallying around publishers who needed help. Good publishers who had cash flow problems, and who put out appeals for assistance, let people know that now was the time to buy. And people did. The Internet meant that information was given to the people who needed it.

Last week, a Web cartoonist with a large readership told his readership that he would really like to quit his day job and devote the time to the comic, if they could raise the same money he made in his day job. His readers dipped into their pockets, five dollars here and ten dollars there, and delivered the annual wages from his day job.

The Internet gives your comics cheap access to the world, without printing bills. It still hasn’t worked out a reliable way to pay people for their work, but Randy Milholland quit his job yesterday to do Something Positive full-time, and Top Shelf and Fantagraphics are both still here.

Despite the grumblers, I think the Internet is a blessing, not a curse.

And if I have a prediction it’s simply this: the often-predicted Death of Comics won’t happen. There will be more booms and there will be more busts. Fads and fashions turn up in comics, as with all things, and, as fads and fashions always do, they will end, normally in tears.

But comics is a medium, not a fad. It’s an art form, not a fashion. The novel was once so called because it was indeed something novel, but it’s lasted, and I think, after a few shakedowns, the graphic novel, in whatever form, will do likewise.