Earlier in this blog, I posted an essay on Comics Yesterday vs. Comics Today. For the print column, I'm going to try some sort of timeline of the changes in the field, making sweeping statements and drawing what I hope will be some relatively valid conclusions.

Which all and sundry will then be free to pick away at.

I have a deep suspicion that many of today's readers and collectors are so used to the way comics are bought and sold today that they don't realize quite how different things used to be. Heck, even in my case, I hadn't done more than generalize about the way comics prices have changed for the "average buyer" -- or who, in fact, that "average buyer" could be said to be.

If you have deep insights on such matters, I'd be pleased to see what they are. But I think there are those, for example, who may think a specific title wasn't "popular," when what it was was "unseen." In the 1950s, for example, if the distributor to your grocery store didn't bother to put Magazine Enterprise's comics on that store's comics rack, you might not have known there was such a publisher -- and you might never have seen Frank Frazetta's work on Ghost Rider.

There have been more changes in this business, folks, than many people know. And I'll share my perspectives in hopes that others with more information will share theirs.