My introduction to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius was in the form of the book Revelation X, a copy of which my father had. The book was published in 1994, but I could swear I had read it while I was still in high school several years earlier. Weirdly, that discrepency somehow seems perfectly fitting. In any event, I did get what they were doing with the book but, at the time, I didn't realize it went beyond that one book. I mean, sure, there was an address to order other books from but I thought that itself was part of the joke. A fake address that annoyed a single postman in Cleveland Heights who had to regularly deal with the mail to this obviously phony address. It wasn't until several years later that I saw/heard of "Bob" again. I want to say from people making analogies to the Flying Spaghetti Monster in 2005 -- here again, that date feels years off from my memory but still it's fitting.

If you're not familiar with the Church of the SubGenius... well, that would take way too long for me to explain here. You're already online if you're reading this; look them up. Suffice it to say that in checking them out for the first time in many years, I discovered they put out a comic book last year. There was always a close adjacency between comics and the followers of "Bob" but I'd never seen an actual comic from them. This one came out last year and was written and drawn by AI. (Keeping with the SubGenius' "slack" theme!) I think every comic creator has been pretty aghast at the notion of AI doing comics but, based on my own experiments with AI, I was reasonably certain it wouldn't work. So how does an AI book look?

SubGenius founder Rev. Ivan Stang includes a pretty detailed explanation of how he put this comic together. He started by having ChatGPT write ten different scripts on how tardigrades and rotifers would survive after all other life on Earth perished. His analysis was "they all sucked." But he did like some of the ideas, and edited the best parts of all ten scripts together and then tweaked things to maintain verb tenses and such. He then used Wonder and Dream to do around fifty variantions of each panel, as he envisioned in his head. He selected what the pieces he felt came closest to what he wanted, and assembled everything together into a single document.

The story itself is pretty simplistic. In the aftermath human destroying all other life, the tardigrades and rotifers wind up in a war fighting over resources. The war lasted generations, decimating whatever was left, until there was only one of each creature left. The last tardigrade ate the last rotifer, and eventually died in the wasteland. But a new micro-organism began to flourish...

That's the whole story. It's simple, but honestly not told all that well. It could very much use more of a "show, don't tell" approach as it's very heavy on using caption boxes to convey most of the action. The art does work with it, and there's even dialogue, but most of the art is more atmospheric than descriptive. And (as should surprise none of you if you've ever used an AI art tool) the designs of the creatures shifts from panel to panel. You can still clearly identify which are tardigrades and which are rotifers, but mostly only because they're so broadly different to begin with.

If you look at it from the standpoint of comics as a medium, it doesn't do much. Pretty much any new stuff at your local comic shop this week will be a better example of the medium. The story itself feels pretty reminiscent of the original EC comics with the classic "twist" endings (heck, even the overall story length is comparable!) but the art isn't as engaging despite being technically rendered better.

I think the book will amuse and entertain folks who already have an interest/affinity for the Church of the SubGenius; the artifactness of a comic not actually written or drawn by anyone. It might interest folks who want to study directly the specifics of how the AI handled different aspects of its execution. For as much as "Bob" does inform/enlighten/entertain/distract me personally, though, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to anyone else. But if you are game to try, The Last Survivors is available through the SubGenius website for $15 US. And that does come with each copy personalized to you and autographed by Rev. Ivan Stang himself! "To dull the pain of existence in a world without slack."

Hägar the Horrible has been a staple of the funny pages for a half century now, first debuting in early 1973. Cartoonist Dik Browne had been working on Hi & Lois for years by then, so he was certainly no stranger to the business. He kept working on it until his retirement in 1988, at which point he passed it along to his son Chris. Chris worked on the strip until his death last year, but the strip continues to run daily.

Honestly, I never paid much attention to the strip. Even back when I was a kid and read the funny pages in both the newspapers my parents got. I would read Hägar but only in that it happened to be on the page next to Garfield or Andy Capp or whatever else. Once I left home and no longer got a paper, I've only read it very sporadically, usually only when I'm looking to see how many cartoonists did a strip about Earth Day or something. I suspect I think more about Hägar the Horrible when I'm listening to Van Halen and make a quick mental joke about the similarity with Sammy Hagar's name. I do vaguely recall seeing news of Browne's death last year, but I don't know that I really continued the thought of who might continue to work on the strip. I suppose I assumed it would be taken up by Chris' brother, Chance, who'd taken over drawing Hi & Lois from their father in 1989.

However, earlier this month, I did see the Hägar strip that ran on July 4 when I was looking to see how many comics included some kind of Independence Day theme this year. And I was struck by how amateurish the strip looked...

The linework is stiff and lacks much variability. There's no sense of depth -- everything feels very flat, despite the pattern on the bedsheet. This doesn't feel like the art style that I've seen off and on for the past however many years.

Having different creators on the strip would hardly be new. I mean, Chris picked it up from his father in the '80s making it a legacy strip for decades just by that measure alone. But addtionally, Dick Hodgins, Jr. inked many of the strips over Chris' pencils, ostensibly dating back to 1995. John Marshall also inked and lettered the strip briefly in the early 2000s. (I've seen contradicting dates on that, but by all accounts, it was half a year at most.) Bob Weber, Jr. was brought on to write the strip in 2015.

In checking on the official Hägar site, however, the only two creators mentioned in the "Cartoonists" section are Dik and Chris. (Weirdly, although it does have birth and death dates noted, Chris' bio is written in the present tense and says he still lives in Florida with his wife -- they moved to South Dakota in 2005 and Carroll died in, I think, 2018.) However, Chris hadn't been working on the strip for not quite a decade before anyway. The strips have been written entirely by Weber, who brought with him Gary Hallgren in 2015. Hallgren has noted that he only did sketch layouts at first and took over inking duties when Hodgins took ill and passed away in 2016, and it was soon after that when Chris himself became too ill to do the pencil work any longer, and Hallgren took over the full art duties.

I found video of Hallgren speaking about his work at Comicfestival München 2023, which took place in July of last year. Hallgren seemed healthy and Denis Kitchen pointed out that he had been doing sketches for fans. But compare these two strips that ran on March 11 and 20 of last year...

In both strips, we have basically just two characters talking to one another. The first strip features a background mountains and clouds, and the characters' faces features expressions that change from the first to second panel. Their hands, while obviously drawn in a cartoony style, hold fairly natural poses. In the second strip, the background is all but nonexistent. Their faces are borderline expressionless, and their hands and arms feel stiff and in awkward positions. They feel to me like they're drawn by different people.

The first strip is absolutely drawn by Hallgren. Notice the odd shape of the key? That's a stylized "GH" that Hallgren sometimes hides in his artwork since he's not allowed to formally sign the work. But now compare the line pattern in Hägar's tunic. In the first strip, they're a series of squiggly lines with enough variation in weight to point to them being inked with a brush. In the second strip, it's just a series of disconnected hash marks that appear to just be made with an ink pen. If you go through the strip day by day, there's a distinct shift when this happens: between March 18 and March 20, 2023. (March 19 was a Sunday strip and likely created much earlier than the two on either side of it.)

So at first blush, it would appear that Hallgren stopped drawing -- or at least inking -- the strip in March of last year. That would contradict what he expressly said months later at Comicfestival München, but the strip to this day continues to bear Chris Browne's signature so inaccurate credits are hardly new here. But what did Hallgren actually say about working on the strip anyway? When asked by Kitchen about his day-to-day process, Hallgren responded...

I check the email because that's how the scripts come in [from Weber]. And when the scripts come in, I wait for Debra Browne to sequence them so that I know which strip is which release date and in what order. Because if I don't do that and just draw what Bob Weber sends me, and then I have to shuffle them and that's not effecient. So I don't waste any time drawing until I've got my sequence and then I bang them out. About a half hour a piece. Just a sketch... real quick sketch... small. So I know where the characters are, where the dialogue starts, where it's placed -- this is very important because each panel has to be composed in a way in which the action is totally clear, there is plenty of room for the words, and any kind of special art that needs to be seen has to have room, you know, for exposition. It's very important; each little panel is an important drawing. And I love strips where it's all dialogue and it's just two guys talking. It's easy...

And after I draw a little rough, I send those to the Brownes. And normally they just say, "fine, go ahead." And then I blow it up on my computer. I blow it up to art size and take it to my studio, put it on a tracing box -- you know what that is, right? A light table. Light's underneath. I can see through it. I take Bristol board, a nice paper, put it on there, draw in pencil... clear. Clear line, no shading. And get my pen and ink, and that's the process.

After it's done, I scan it, email it to Debra Browne, and I never see it again.

For the record, Debra is Chance Browne's widow and has been the editor on Hägar for many years. And again, this description of Hallgren's process took place months after Chris passed.

Still, the art style of Hägar definitely changed during the March published strips of last year, as I said. The art that appeared in those strips would've been drawn a minimum of two weeks, possibly as many as six, ahead of time, so the switch would likely have occured at the drawing board towards the beginning of Feburary. Which seems like a poignient point to segue to a reminder that Chris Browne passed away on Feburary 4, 2023. It's almost as if Chris' death directly impacted the artwork on the strip, even though he hadn't been drawing it.

Hallgren has been very clear that he was penciling and inking the strips after Browne first fell ill. And the various announcements on Browne's death noted, taken from comments directly from the Browne family, that he had been ill for some time. My guess is that actually goes back to around March/April of 2016 as the lettering style for the strips' dates changes and Browne's signature gets very shaky for a while before suddenly shifting to copy/paste consistency. In an 2023 interview with Chris' sister Sally, it's mentioned that Chris himself retired in 2017. Regardless of the specific timing, we're still looking at it having been years since Chris actually drew the strip.

Are there any other shifts we can see in the art when we compare before and after March of last year? I've gone through a variety of strips from the past year and found several of Hallgren's initials buried in the art at least as recently as two weeks ago, so it would appear that he's still working on the strip. Since Hallgren didn't originate the strip, I don't think a subsequent artist would add those in the way they might if Dik had included something like that. In the video I linked above, Hallgren's wearing a visored cap and sunglasses so I thought perhaps he's having issues with his eyesight. In digging through the ComicArtFans site, though, I've also found multiple sketches Hallgren did for fans around the time of that interview. Interestingly, they include the hash-style detailing on Hägar's tunic that I was thinking might be the result of a different inker and the sketches also point to the more fluid and natural character posing that Hallgren was clearly doing years earlier. Hallgren doesn't seem to have lost any of his artistic chops and the change in tunic design was more of choice on his part than simply from a change of inkers.

So are there any other clues in the past year's worth of strips? There does seem to be another shift in how the strips' dates are lettered. But while that does suggest a change in finishers, it doesn't speak to who that might be. However, while going through and checking for Hallgren's initials, I did notice several places where I thought I was seeing similarities with Weber's drawing style. Generally, just a background character here or there, but enough to make me pause. Weber, if you're not familiar, has actually done his own strips for several years, most famously Slylock Fox, which has been running since 1987. So having Weber draw at least some of the strips he's writing wouldn't be that odd a proposition. So I went back through some recent Slylock Fox strips to see if I could spot any more direct parallels. Compare this June 20 Slylock Fox with the July 4 Hägar the Horrible that I posted above...

The character's pajamas here bear a superficial similarity to the bed sheet earlier, mostly due to the same basic green and simple pattern. But notice in particular that the pillows have the same shape and lack any folds in them -- even a simple curved line to suggest there's a slight dip when one's head would rest, as is typical in cartoon pillows. The sheet also bears a similar treatment of the trim near the top. These are hardly tell-tale signs that Weber drew both strips, of course, but combined with some of the similar figures I'd been seeing already, I'm thinking Weber has a more direct role working on the art for Hägar than he used to.

I did consider that perhaps Weber's current partner on Slylock Fox, Scott Diggs Underwood, might be helping. After all, Weber was the one who brought in Hallgren to begin with, so maybe he opted to bring in someone else he knew when Hallgren began to step back a bit. But I absolutely can't see any of Underwood's style in Hägar at all. I mean, clearly whoever is working on Hägar has to change their normal style to at least somewhat match Chris' and Underwood does try to blend his style in with Weber's as seemlessly as possible on Slylock Fox, but I'm just not seeing anything in the art to suggest Underwood is touching Hägar.

I suspect -- and I'll admit up-front that I have no proof of this, much less anything resembling inside information -- that when Chris Browne passed away, Hallgren used that opportunity to step away slightly from working on the daily strip. He claims he's been only putting about 20 hours a week in on the strip, but he's also nearly 80 years old. While he doesn't seem to be in ill health, the visor/sunglasses combo he wears in that video along with the cane resting nearby suggest that his health isn't as good as it was even as recently as 2021, judging by his Facebook photos. His sketchwork, as I said, shows he's not incapable certainly, but the death of Chris could easily have him reflecting on his own mortality and wanting to spend less time mandatorially at the drawing board. Or potentially, he does have some eye issues that prevent him from staring at his light board for extended periods. Again, speculation on my part, to be 100% clear.

But doesn't that idea contradict his statements from June 2023 about how he works on the strip? Well, I think he still does contribute most of the art to it. I think he still gets scripts from Weber, does a rough thumbnail type sketch for approval, and then sketches out a full-size pencil version, which is why we still see the "GH" pop up in the art periodically. But note that he said he did those in a kind of clear line style, i.e. without shading and texture and much detail. If then, he passes the pencil art back to Weber and it's Weber himself who inks the piece, that would certainly explain while I was seeing some stylistic similarities with Slylock Fox and, depending on how loose Hallgen's pencils are, could also account from some of the figure stiffness we see in the final product. Further, some of those "GH"s look less like an actual "GH" than you would expect from someone putting their initials in the art...

They look like they were inked by somebody who just saw it as a general design element in the pencil artwork, not necessarily specific ligature. Note how the lower part of the "G" isn't even remotely conneted to the crossbar. Hallgren does mention inking in his statement, but I'm wondering if that was a still-recent-enough change to be considered a slip of the tongue -- he had been inking the strip for nearly a decade after all, and a new process would be, at best, only a few months old. It's also possible that Hallgren is still inking some of the strips -- most (but not all!) of the Sunday installments still look reasonably fluid. And if Hallgren is still inking some of the strips, he does seem conscientious enough of an artist to shift how he renders the tunic's texture to match Weber for the sake of artistic consistency.

So who is actually working on Hägar these days? Weber and Hallgren are both definitely working on the strip, but the breakdown of who actually does what is a bit murky, despite Hallgren's explanation from last year. Despite Browne's signature remaining on the strip every day, it appears to me that Bob Weber, Jr. is writing all of them, Gary Hallgren is doing pencils for all of them, the two of them are splitting inking duties with Weber handling the bulk of it, all while Debra Browne oversees, organizes, and rubber stamps their work. But if someone has conclusive proof of some other arrangement, I'd be happy to hear it!

Way back in 1998, one of the exhibitors at Comic-Con (I want to say it was Wizard) set up a live webcam at their booth. It consisted of jumpy video (something like 1 frame every 5 seconds) and no audio, but it was the first time I got any real sense of what the convention was like. I watched as people meandered by, some in costume. Sometimes someone would stop by the booth and present some of their recently obtained swag to the camera. It was very exciting for me, stuck at the time in Ohio, to even participate that tangentially. I expect some local San Diego stations mentioned it in passing to explain why traffic was so bad around the convention center, or maybe as a quick answer to why people might see someone in a Superman or Batman costume walking around. But that kind of video never made it to the internet, so I missed whatever might have aired. Attendance at the show was around 42,000.

Ten years later, the G4 network broadcast live from the show for four hours straight. NBC posted a couple hours of footage on Hulu. Comic Book Resources launched "CBR TV" with both recorded and live pieces from a yacht docked near the convention center. Not to mention how everyone was using social media (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all only a few years old then) to post news and photos and videos from the show floor. The show had grown to 126,000.

After several years of fire regulations capping the show to a maximum of 135,000, the show has risen to around 150,000 attendees but I can't seem to find any special coverage. There are certainly outlets that are reporting on the events of the show, there was obviously a bit of excitement about Robert Downey Jr.'s surprise appearance, but I don't get the sense of it being as big a thing as before. Despite the higher attendance. The outlets that seem to be doing anything that would've looked like special coverage ten years ago are retailers focusing on only their properties, and basically just doing video announcements. Marvel Studios, Hasbro, etc. The various networks aren't ignoring the show, but their pieces seem to be limited to two minute human interest pieces. There is some reporting on sites like The Beat and CBR, but they are mostly looking at just the news itself with an almost-forgotten, "Oh, yeah, we heard about this at Comic-Con" line tucked in towards the end somewhere.

So what I'm wondering is: what do these changes actually mean?

I think one of the more obvious things we can take away from this is that specialized news reporting never was never as lucrative as everyone thought it might be. I mean, the reason G4 isn't doing any coverage from the show is because the entire network shut down. Twice, in fact. It was first closed down in 2014, but it was brought back in 2021 only to close again almost exactly one year later. Comcast Spectacor CEO Dave Scott noted at in 2022: "We worked hard to generate that interest in G4, but viewership is low and the network has not achieved sustainable financial results." Look at virtually all the dedicated "geek" news outlets over the past decade or so and you'll find much the same pattern. The actual comics news you followed them for devolved into press releases and generic entertainment news. No one has yet figured out a genuinely long-term business strategy to keep their site in the black. I don't know the finances of any of the sites out there providing Comic-Con coverage but I think I can pretty confidently say sending writers out to cover the show at all is a loss leader at best.

I recall a few years back, I attended a dinner that a publisher hosted during a convention. It included a handful of their authors and several comic news reporters and bloggers were invited. One of the writers, in introducing herself to us, broke the ice by asking each of what we did for a living. The assumption being that no one actually makes money as a comics reporters and that you have to hold some kind of other job to make ends meet. It was actually a fair assumption, too, because everyone did indeed have a "day job" they used to pay the bills.

Basically, pop culture news in general isn't very profitable and, even if you're able to get it to work at all, it doesn't scale up. Whatever venture capital was thrown at various outlets and whatever seed money a larger company set aside for an internal reporting group very quickly got burned through by sending a team to San Diego (and also probably New York) every year and so it's simply not done any more.

But I think there's some other conclusions we can come to from the evolution of Comic-Con reporting. The Star Wars prequels started in 1999. The first X-Men movie came out in 2000 and the first Spider-Man movie in 2002. Those years were the start of a trend in fandom-based pop culture where movies were no longer a 90-120 minute piece of entertainment to be left behind as you exited the theater, but a piece of narrative fiction that you carried with you and became a fan of. As the years roll on, you see more and more of what would've once been dismissed trite junk for geeky outsiders become truly popular with large groups of fans adopting their interest in as a part of their very identity. Lord of the Rings in 2001, Doctor Who in 2005, Twlight in 2005 (for the books) and 2008 (for the movies), Iron Man and the MCU in 2008, Walking Dead in 2010... Some attempts dropped the ball after a few years (Lost, Game of Thrones, etc.) but there were enough different properties out there that spoke to different people to satisfy pretty much everyone. By the time you get to the 2010s, it's virtually everywhere and became something of an accepted part of modern life. Everyone has their special favorite. But as Dash Par pointed out: when everybody is special, no one is.

Yes, Comic-Con only rolls around once a year and it's still a pop culture mecca. But the amount of stuff that would normally debut at Comic-Con is just so high that it HAS to be spread out over the entire year now. You get announcements at New York or Chicago shows. And sometimes at events that are even more hyper-specific, like Star Wars Celebration or JoeFest. Comic-Con isn't as unique or special as it once was in terms of being THE stand-out annual event for pop culture announcements and, therefore, doesn't get specialized attention. So even the local news isn't doing more than their old two minute human interest pieces.

Those are the two biggest stand-out things I can think of regarding what the coverage changes over the years can tell us, but I feel like there's some other big things I'm missing. What do you think? What else does coverage of the show over the years tell us about journalism, about fandoms, about pop culture?

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Cyn Review
https://ift.tt/NbQvpRE

Kleefeld on Comics: Laser Focus
https://ift.tt/8lL1gdi

Kleefeld on Comics: Documentary on Roy Crane
https://ift.tt/pXAGuS7

Kleefeld on Comics: Some Interesting Comic-Con Stats
https://ift.tt/ag6xckS

Yesterday, YouGov released the results of a survey they did on the level and types of interest in Comic-Con. Not necessarily about people who actually go, but about Americans in general. You can read the full results at the link, but I wanted to make some interesting call-outs.

First, almost exactly half of respondants had no interest at all in the convention with another 15% "not very interested." I have to admit that I am genuinely surprised those numbers are that low. We're looking at a full third of the US population who says they have at least some interest in the convention. Not surprisingly, that third tends to skew towards men, age 18-34 but that's still a much heftier group than I woulld've guessed. If this same survey had been done twenty years ago, I can almost guarantee those numbers would've been small enough to almost seen as rounding errors.

What's not surprising because it tracks pretty closely with anecdotal information I expect most of us have seen/heard over the last several years, movies are the biggest draw of the con among those who responded they were interested. Followed closely by TV, video games, and celebrity appearances. Only about 45% of respondants expressed and interest in comics. Although muddying that number slightly is that YouGov offered "anime and manga" as a seperate category, but since people could select multiple interests and it was all self-selected, we don't know how many manga fans also selected "comics" because "manga are comics" or how many were interested in anime but not manga. So it's possible that 45% could potentially be higher, depending on how people defined things. But even if you want to inlude some kind of manga 'bump' to show that yes, over half people are interested in some aspect of comics from Comic-Con, that's almost certainly still less than the number interested in movies.

(As an aside, I don't see any information about the level of confidence they offer with any of these numbers and/or what kind of margin of error they're considering. They do claim to have gotten results back from a group that reflects a reprsentation of US adults, broken down by age, race, gender, education, and region but they don't offer any details beyond that as far as I can tell.)

Also not surprising, about two-thirds of people get news and updates about the convention through social media primarily and half of those through friends and family specifically. Given how few outlets cover the convention at all (beyond an obligatory passing mention that it's happening) and the outlets that do show up can only send a handful of people at most, there's inherently going to be a LOT more people on the convention floor talking about what they're doing via social media. You can read about ALL the coverage by following a few hashtags, whereas if you just look at a news site, you're going to only get few highlights from the one or two or three people they have reporting.

Anyway, no huge surprises, I don't think. Most of it just puts some data to anecdotal observations with the possible exception of the overall reach. Always good to confirm what you think is going on, though, so I absolutely welcome seeing this, even if it's perhaps not as in-depth or detailed as I'd like.

I've noted my not-entirely-great experiences with Roy Crane in the past. I came across his work first in Buz Sawyer and only later found his earlier Wash Tubbs. You can read more of my problems with him there, but the upshot was that Crane depicted some terribly gross characterizations that I found quite objectionable.

That said, however, I do recognize his talent as a draftsman, and I know his work has been praised highly in that regard in the past. It's in that context that I watched this short documentary on Crane posted by the Kimbrough Library at Ringling College of Art + Design. It covers his entire career and, while it glosses over some of his decidedly un-PC depictions, it does elaborate on Crane's innovations and contributions in storytelling. (h/t Ben Towle for pointing me to the video)

It's well worth the sixteen minutes to sit through all five parts. I'm no expert on Crane, nor do I ever intend to be one given how much I dislike his actual stories, but it never hurts to have a better understanding of different aspects of comics history even if they're from creators who you dislike.

A few hundred years ago, many of the scientific fields we're familiar with today didn't exist. There was no such thing as electronics. Or robotics. Or particle physics. Science hadn't evolved enough for people to have discovered those avenues of thought. Even fields of study that were around were largely combined in broader categories. Biology and chemistry were the same pursuit as far as most people were concerned.

Despite general advances and specialization, the public writ large still held "science" as a single field well into the twentieth century. How many comics of the Golden Age feature scientists that are comfortable switching from mechanical engineering to biophysics? How does Hank Pym make any sense? He developed a shrinking gas, has a complete biological understanding of insects, and can build sentient robots!

I bring it up because I'm thinking about how the study of comics history has a similar specialization that most people aren't aware of. How many people even within comics still see it as a single field if study? I used to think I knew my comics history pretty well... until I read a history of comic strips that introduced a slew of comics and creators I'd never heard of. And then I read a history of manga that was filled with names I'd never seen before. And there was a video that included comments on European creators. And a book on Indian comics. And a book on Mexican creators. And...

I still know next to nothing about comics from South America. A whole continent of comics about which I'm scarcely even aware exists!

One of my goals from many years ago was to become a comics expert. I wanted to be THE answer man for comics. That's about the same as trying to become THE expert on science. It's just too broad a topic for one person to become an expert in. I saw someone recently looking for an expert on Charlton creators that might be the equivalent of what Doc Vassillo is to early Marvel creators. I know someone who got her advanced degree on Richard Outcault and another who wrote his doctoral thesis on Batman. The level of specialization is astounding!

It's not impossible to know a great deal about comics in general. But there's an increasing world of difference between being a comics generalist and being an expert laser-focused in a specific field of comics studies. And I haven't even been talking about comics business or production processes!