Remember when you used to put out a great comic book, and then you’d market the stuffing out of it to make all your money, while comics were the loss leader. Manufacturers would create toy lines, comic books, board games, video games, books, clothes, movies, toys you name it, if it caught on you were gold. Well, apparently toys aren’t doing as good today as they once were, and toy companies are going back to some of their more brilliant ideas in the past… Like GiJoe, Transformers, and now the BIG WHEEL. Where does your comic fit into all of this?

As a parent, there are a lot of toys I can’t stand. There are too many electronic toys that once you get them, they don’t work, they are annoying to operate, and once you’ve spent $40 on some silly robot dog, the kid doesn’t play with it after about 5 minutes.

This is the culture that an electronic generation is cultivating–shorter attention spans–less creativity–less toy playin–and more expensive toys. I read some kind of World Stat Book and the amount of $$ spent on toys in the US was about 1500% of that of other countries. (Don’t quote me on that, my lack of attention span just saw a really big graph compared to about 10 other really small graphs representing the difference.

Where does this end up? Do we eventually blip out, when our attention as a culture goes from 2 hours to 30 minutes to 5 minutes to 1 minute to 30 seconds to 15 seconds to 1 second.

My point — if I have one — is this — You don’t have to rely on marketing to sell other products with your comic books. Sell the comic book as a trend setter to reverse the trend of digitizing your kids (even though they will probably read it on their ipads) Reading is reading. It is ever bit as popular as Kindle books. Take pride in your art work. Take pride in your stories. It doesn’t have to be a loss leader. Comics can be the leader if you let it and you believe. Isn’t that what comics are about anyway?