If you don't mind, a labored analogy.

Imagine if you will, a successful restaurant, good food with generous portions, decent prices, and cheerful, efficient service. This restaurant has built back it's reputation from the previous owners after many years of downtime.

Imagine your surprise when the next time you go into the restaurant, you realize that they have cut your favorite meal out of the menu, and instead replaced it with 3 varieties of pasta. "What happened to the veal?" you asked.

"No one wanted it. But everyone loves pasta."

O.K. You go along, and sure enough the pasta is pretty good. You don't really notice that the price is a couple dollars higher, and it took a couple minutes longer to get to you. You forgive the snappy waiter.

The next time you go in the restaurant, they have 3 more varieties of pasta, but not the one you enjoyed last time. But you order one anyway, after waiting half an hour for the waiter to show up. The meal shows up, and you realize that it's half the size of the last meal, and doesn't come with any side dishes, and the waiter is a total snot. Plus, it isn't all that good. And when you go to pay, you realize it's way more expensive.


O.K.

What I'm really talking about here is the comic business. After the horrible 90's, where Marvel seemed to feel they could throw any old crap out there as long as it was Spider-man and had the Marvel imprint, the comic industry righted itself and started producing some great comics. At the end of the latest cycle, they threw out a couple of universe spanning crossovers which were well done and sold extremely well.

And then another, and another. And they came in later, or sometimes, not at all.

Too bad we have to learn the same lessons again and again.

There are still lots of great titles coming out, but they're coming from Dark Horse and Image and other smaller publishers, right now.

Most damaging to the momentum, in my opinion, is the constant late product. Very taxing on the cash flow and on the customer's patience.

I was interested to find out that almost all the established comic shops started seeing a bit of a slowdown on comics at mid-summer, which was exactly when I started to notice it.

It's not too late for them to get it right. And thankfully, the comic business is diversified enough that I don't have to worry as much about whether Marvel and DC get it right. And it's still better than it's ever been.