To what do comics own their success?
Is it a creator like Sheldon Mayer that defines their status and all that would follow?
Are they triumphal when critics and academics look across and admire Sheldon Moldoff for being 'already postmodern'?
Do comics need editors like Mort Weisinger to trumpet the merit of the character whose book they edit? Or chummy editors who draw the reader into their circle, and give some recognition to artists like Joltin' Joe Sinnott while they're about it?
Has the industry risen to its feet when companies like Continuity and Image break away from the work-for-hire and take control of their own profits and creations? All of those things.
Then can this medium embrace the same notion that lovers of opera and chamber music adopt; that those with their feet on the seats in the front row of the picture house declaim - that their artform is nothing without its audience? The entertainment world must entertain; whatever other ideas it entertains.
II
Accepting the premise that comics are nothing without readers, who are they? Readers can be Japanese business people standing on the bullet train reading their manga, or the troops stationed at the fighting.
A readership in 1937 is different to one in 2007 so how is the size of the readership tempered by the sensibility of the readership?
Really, the reader has been implicit and complicit in every post on this primer. Nuff said.
