In comics, I've often thought that people primarily avoid unheard of titles for fear that they might find themselves picking up an unreliable book which will stop publishing before the story reaches its conclusion.  I'd never thought much more on the subject.  But the book I'd replaced on the rack had come with an ending, and it occurred to me that my automatic and evidently dominant concern hadn't been about product reliability, but: would it be cool to read this?

I choked on my fries, and blinked.  ‘Wow,' I thought, ‘that's not like me.'  So I stomped back to the store and bought the book.  What the heck does ‘Cool' mean, anyway?

I thought about it a little, and decided that in the case of a book, ‘cool' meant that other people were reading it; that it had been generally accepted by the book buying public as worth paying attention to.  Of course, for a writer, paying attention to unconventional material and then telling people about it is part of the job description, and normally I do that on autopilot, absorbing all kinds of weird stuff to great advantage.  And heck, everybody has individual interests shared by nobody but themselves.  It's what makes us each unique.  Being human, however, no matter how we all seem to balk at the idea, requires of us that we also watch the Simpsons and read Stephen King novels.  It's a vital part of life.  (No.  Really.)  Get this:

Having a successful society means that two people living on either ends of a continent are able to come together and talk about the latest Star Wars movie, (or its equivalent.  —In earlier history, it was things like myth and legend, and more recently, the bible, though mind you, ‘society' was often a much smaller deal in those days.  City-states and towns were often their own little worlds, with their own cultures.  We're bigger today).  Anyway, for a culture to work, people have to agree upon common ideas and morals, otherwise there is no culture.  And one of the most easily digestible mediums for accomplishing this is that of story-telling.  I believe there is something buried deep in the human condition which knows the value of a cohesive society; something closely related to the survival instinct.  So it seems natural to me that one of the questions we instinctively ask ourselves when we consider paying precious attention to something new is: "If I pay attention to this, will it help connect me to the rest of the world?"

Whether or not we listen to the answer is another question entirely.  These days everything is so fragmented.  There are more than a hundred comics to choose from, and more films and musical groups than ever before.  Soon there will be hundreds of television channels as well.  It's confusing.  —The music industry is on the rocks, but interestingly, movies are making more money than ever, and top video games gross billions.

Here's the difference as I see it: With music the times are gone when people picked up the latest Who or Rolling Stones album simply because that's what everybody else was doing.  Now the millions of people who typically sit on the fence stay on the fence for lack of any really bright focal points of attention.  There's too much to choose from, so the music industry languishes even amidst such an abundance of material.  New video games, however, though constantly produced, arrive on the scene in a slow trickle, and the game playing public eagerly jumps on the next release in one big clump.  And films, though many are made, are only ever marketed about 5 or 6 at one time, so again, everybody can watch the same things and talk about them.  (Plus films, once watched are essentially used up and quickly need replacing.)

Comics occupy the same situation as the music industry.  They're cheep to produce, (same as CD's now), so everybody makes them.   —Comics were at their strongest when there were only about thirty titles available and everybody knew who Spiderman was.

Too many choices, can deflate a mass medium.  —Not just because "the public's buying power is too thinly spread" but also partly because society has a built in need to be unified in the things it reads, watches and listens to.  If it was just a "buying power," thing then the same amount of money would still be procured, just more thinly spread as suggested, but that's simply not the case.  The mass market loses interest when people can't agree on what to pay attention to.

(Of course, comics did enjoy huge public attention much earlier than the Spiderman era, when comics practically sprang from the sewers in their sheer numbers.  But the world was minus a couple of strong competing mediums then, so many comics could succeed in their own niches of interest simply because there was so much public attention to spare.  But Everybody still knew who little Nemo was.  And Dick Tracy.  And The Spirit.  Unfortunately, those times are gone.  Now it's Scully & Mulder.  Oh well).

Luckily, I don't have to worry terribly over the buying whims of the mass market.  I am in the enviable position of being able to publish for those select and genuinely interested few who read T&K.  What can I say?  I'm a happy guy.  And interestingly, as T&K become more firmly established, sales seem to increase.  The First Trade is slated for a re-print in March.  Well, now.  That's a good thing!