Not on the Menu.

Hold the pickle. Hold the ray gun.

So I said something the other day that I thought was pretty mild, and it was that buying comics isn't the same thing as ordering off a menu.

Apparently, some people take objection to that, claiming that's Marxist, or whatever.

I'm not saying you shouldn't get a Captain America comic when you buy a Captain America comic. I'm saying that ordering off a menu is a poor analogy.

If I order off a menu, I can get my steak medium rare, I can change my side of vegetables, I can order a baked potato plain or loaded, I can hold the pickle, or I can ask for mild or spicy.

From some Marvel greeting cards I penciled back in the dark ages. Written by Stan Lee. Inks by Jimmy Palmiotti. I have no idea if they were released.

You can't do that with a book. The book was created months before you bought it. You can't ask for changes in the book at the time you see it on the shelf.

If you don't like the direction of a comic, you can certainly write the publisher, but it will take months - and maybe years - before work in the pipeline wrangles its way out to reflect what fans suggest, if the publisher even chooses to go with what fans suggest.

And fans aren't a monolithic entity, they don't all want the same things. It's impossible to please all of the fans, impossible to cater to every fan opinion.

This fan likes Mentallo, this fan hates Dr Doom. This fan likes Spider Ham, this fan loves Spider Gwen. This fan hates the marriage of Spidey and Mary Jane, this fan loves it.

Ultimately, the publisher makes the final decision in all things, because the publisher owns the IP.

If the publisher is more interested in branding than in cultivating what they (not me) consider a small market, then you're going to have disappointed fans who want a certain kind of comic they may have read before and would like to read again.

I don't think this is a political issue at all. As a long time comic book reader, I'm not super happy with changes in my favorite stuff, and don't even read most anymore. I just reread my old favorites which are now collected in big expensive volumes.

Nothing will ever recapture the thrill of being a kid discovering the Legion of Super-heroes for the first time. But I can return to old favorites whenever I like.

And I do.

But I understand why some people are disappointed old favorites no longer reflect their tastes or values.

My full-on disagreement that buying comics is like ordering from a menu does not obviate this.

I think it's actually more Marxist to crowd-mind stories than to create one the old fashioned way: with one or a small group of creators brainstorming the job.

I'm half joking here, don't freak out.

Anyway, I don't like some comics, I love some others. Some I don't like I still recognize as quality work, they're just not to my taste.

But when I want to visit an old favorite, it's always there.

IMHO, comic companies aren't at their best as lifestyle brands to be molded by the kind of people who would sneer at geeks in 1979, while making money off them in 2025.

You want to make money off of fans, well, write and draw sincere stories that people want to read. If sufficient quantities of people read them, you either keep doing what you're doing, or you change.

That's it. That's mainstream comics publishing.