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At one point, I may have gotten a little geeky, though, because at lunch Guy brought Rob Legato over with a stack of mail. Rob read one such earnest missive off the top of the pile, undoubtedly from a serious young man in the Midwest, taking Paramount to task over some continuity glitch from a few episodes before. At the end of this overlong screed, Rob looked up and waved his arm around in a grand but exasperated gesture and said, "It’s just a TV show." And I think that’s what’s going on at the big companies. Before the advent of widespread Internet use, they had complete control over the public per ception of their product. Any audience feedback an outside observer would see was mostly relegated to fanzines with a limited circulation, the odd thing like Amazing Heroes or Alter Ego , or commentary in the letters pages of the comics themselves. Mostly, that’d be an easy thing for companies to stay on top of.

But now.

Now, any malcontent can post up any damn thing they want on a website, and have the same accessibility to a potential audience as, say, an announcement of new work on Neil Gaiman’s blog, and, further, to the uninitiated, have the same apparent weight and import.

You can see where the only sane response to so much untended opinion spew is to just consider it all crap and get on with the job.

Now, that’s not to say that people aren’t listening. It’s just that to those try ing to pay attention, sometimes it’s a little difficult to find the prize in the big box of Cracker Jacks that is the Internet.

Hopefully, you’ve found more toys than un-popped kernels in the past year’s worth of these columns. I sure do appreciate your attention.

See you around.

Lead a Horse to Water May 31, 2002

Well, I’m back (check the date), and it looks like I was mostly right.

Way back in what was only the second installment of Loose Cannon, I wrote this about the then-upcoming Spider-Man movie: "All Marvel has to do is produce a sixteen page introduction to the Spider-Man mythos, drawn in a clear style, and reminiscent, at least somewhat, of the characters and sit uations as portrayed in the film… to GIVE AWAY for free at EVERY SINGLE

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