If you love something the weirdest things will choke you up. I have this severe affection for comics when it works as a publishing business, the thought of there being this modest but very real network of stores that people look forward to visiting (or aisles into which they'll squeeze), physical places for which people carve time out of their lives, that several people are employed by this system of delivery and the money works its way up the chain into the pockets of those that are using it to raise their families, pay their bills, buy things of immediate use. There's something beautiful about that for me, something that simply isn't there when I think about intellectual property development or giving something away for free to reinforce a brand, or when it seems that the only people's stories a medium wants to tell are the stories that end with someone making millions of dollars.
There's always this effort in comics to connect to the past, to remind one of past glories, to rediscover high-minded art from years before, to connect the art form to similar work in other media, and all that's fine. I'd also suggest there's honor in being last, that there's something to the fact that comics was the last art form to make itself up, to create its own myths, to put on long pants and walk outside and start shaking hands. I'm an awful sentimentalist, I know, self-absorbed and patronizing. It's just that for all the comics I download, for all the stars-in-the-making I write about, all the profiles I read and all the newly-minted executives I see congratulated on twitter, for all my mind warps when I see the profiles and the movies and the attention paid to great works, I still remember the exact feeling across the shoulder and through two fingers of pulling a spinner rack from left to right, exactly how much pressure I had to apply to the door of my first comics shop to pop it past the rubber mat bunched up just past the stoop, precisely how the artificial light bounced off a funnybook cover my second store's strange idea of lighting, its angular shelves filled with the black and white comic books that would break its back six months later.
Not to make too much of all that -- there was a horrible grind back then, too, daily inequities out the wazoo, and plenty of exploitation, and restrictions on expression and opportunity and variety and any sane guarantee of quality that could outright destroy an artist's soul and that frequently cast people into ruin. I do sometimes miss the scale, though, the straight-up modesty of a self-contained enterprise that nonetheless touched dozens of people from pen to product. I hope we never lose it.
