Quality first

I’ve said this recently and so have others, but for serious: You just cannot care about keeping up with the Joneses if you want to make good comics, or want other people to make them. You can’t. Naruto’s Bookscan rankings, or the Flight kids getting a book deal during their sophomore year in animation school, or Penny Arcade’s readership mounting a credible third-party presidential campaign or whatever–these phenomena may or may not involve good comics, but they don’t replace good comics, or the need to apply all the usual standards in deciding whether they’re good comics (and therefore good for comics in the way that really matters) or not in the first place.