Oh, sure, yeah, back when comics were made with this "imaginary, 8-year old" audience in mind, Ben might pull the arm off a robot and make a crack about Hank Aaron as he bludgeoned the 'bot into scrap. Yeah, kid stuff. For kids who we now KNOW were never there! Never there! Listen to the boss, guys. He'll tell ya. The kids the party was being thrown for never showed up! It was us, the dedicated, violence-lovin', gore-soaked fanboys all along... We're the ones who count. We always wuz.

So now Ben isn't fighting a robot. That guy coming at him, he's going to have to lose an arm. What? You think being a "hero" is easy? You think it doesn't come with a price? Ben can't afford to be a nice guy. You know that. We know it. So watch as we make that happen for you...

And you love us for it, don't you? Well, even if you're one of the namby-pamby complainers, one of the kiddy-book school, and somehow you don't perceive how RIGHT all of this is, everybody else is loving us for it. All 120,000 readers left in America. 

And hey, when 120,000 people all agree on something, who're the ones who are right here? Simple math should tell you it's the 120,000. Wait. 115,000. 112,000. 109,000...

Romanticism is a far more difficult trick to pull off successfully than naturalism. Almost any other form of writing is. Naturalism requires only one question. "How would this REALLY happen?" How would these characters really sound? What really happens in a super-hero brawl? Or when a space-vehicle crashes in a rural field in Middle America? How does someone really respond when their parents are shot dead in front of their 10-year old eyes?

Fortunately, for the naturalists, the mythicists, pulp novelists, and adventure fiction specialists already paved clear, distinct paths to successful destinations for them to wander from and, more importantly, come back to whenever the need strikes. Nothing in most fiction actually happens as it would in real life. If it did, we could all watch and read about real life with the same hunger for closure and sense of justice that fiction provides. That love of adventure would be happening in our lives and not those of our favorite heroes and heroines. Real life wouldn't be as messy.

Ah, but since real life is, and fiction is SO frickin' impossible to buy into so much of the time ("Yeah, super-heroes would be nice guys. Sure they would. After all, the guys with power and license to do what the rest of us can't in this world are social crusaders and defenders of the weak and downtrodden. You bet...") all the Naturalists have to do is bring a little bit of that ugliness and violence from our world back into theirs and the tone of everything takes on a different hue. Darker. More palpable. More real.

Now you can read a comic book without feeling embarrassed by how silly it all is. No one builds that many robots. Ben can't always fight a robot. He's gotta rip real people in half. Get it? Show that to your critics and the ones who look down on your hobby, who laugh at what you love. If they only knew how bloody and meaningful this stuff has become, they'd see that you were right all along... Buncha' meanies... Wish someone'd take their arm off and beat 'em over the head with it...

Of course, because the roadways we're tearing up do wind their way through fantasy, the real world never intersects in such a way that we have to entirely give up the things that define the genre. Dead heroes coming back. Alien invasions. All that stuff. It wouldn't be super-hero comics without them. Only now we do them RIGHT.

Westerns, same thing. Everyone knows the cliches. We gotta surprise 'em with what it's like when you really stake someone out on an anthill. Take 'em through every second of that. Every nibble. Every chomp. Let's spend the issue watching this guy die for hours. Didn't expect that from the Lone Ranger, didja? Hell, no. We are frickin' geniuses.

Today's crop of writers hew just closely enough to the established map to never need the gift of invention or draw too deeply upon their well of creativity, precious commodity that it is, and one that their skinflint employers really don't pay them enough to deplete. No, they stick to the bits and pieces the old folks before them hacked out and give a wonderful, blood-red and bile-soaked sheen... Make you feel the bullet as it rips through your lower intestine. And then the next one as it ricochets inside your rib cage... That's entertainment, brother.

Romanticism? The stuff we built today's better material upon? That's just a bunch of laughable cliches...

... That are really, really hard to write well. And again, they don't pay us enough to work that hard. Enjoy this month's Afterlife With Archie.

Conrad is correct. Current writers would have to be willing to write outside their comfort zone and that of the current audience. More than that, we'd need professional editors to actually impose real standards and shape the companies' output to reach a wider readership; editors from outside the business with knowledge of real storytelling. 

Julius Schwartz worked in the real world before coming to comics. So did Mort Weisinger and most of the others. They hired writers like Gardner Fox, Otto Binder, and John Broome who wrote more than just comics. Hell, Stan Lee did things other than comics. Not so the current crop of rubber-stampers who simply schedule crossover events and otherwise rely upon spell-check to do more than half their work for them.

We'd need actual professionals to get anywhere again.

Unfortunately, once comics go "kiddie" again, the current crowd will depart in droves, bawling about how the best age of comics has been torn down by simplistic, kindergarten-minded visigoths and parents groups who could not appreciate the sublime wonder and exquisite craftsmanship that went into drowning that woman in the bathtub in Captain America. "The Fifties are back! Censorship reigns! Every comic now is an Archie comic, except now even the good ones of that line are taken from us! God, remember when comics were good and Jughead got eaten by his zombie dog?"

Make no mistake. There are many who believe that comics have never been better than they are today.

One of the owners of the store where I used to shop would sneer at customers whose choices did not meet his criteria for cool. All Spider-Man comics were deemed trash by him following "One More Day." The creators wouldn't let the story move forward. Wouldn't let Spider-Man grow up. Have kids. Be a man. They just erased everything about him that made him a decent character, turning him back into a stupid kid. Why read a story that will never go anywhere?

Any step back towards a larger audience will completely alienate the audience we have, and there is no guarantee the audience we want will be waiting to jump aboard. If there were a significant sales spike in comics whenever a film came out, I might be willing to believe people of all ages wanted comics again. 

There really isn't one though, so I think the companies are happy to stick with the crowd they have, sick and depraved though their tastes may be. Hey, those tastes match their own, and it's not like the kids are coming back. The Orwellian company line teaches us, after all, that they were never here to begin with.