I was involved in a brief discussion recently on a British comics mailing list. One of the correspondents was happy to say that he hasn't read any 'US mainstream' comics in years, possibly decades. Instead he reads works from non-Anglophone and vastly more comics-enlightened countries such as France, Belgium, Italy and Japan, and the occasional small-press comic from Britain or America (as in photocopied by the creator, not the erroneous 'small-press' appellation which is often misattributed to small, independent publishers).

More power to him.

Initially, this fellow decried the crippling and self-defeating adherence to decades-long continuity plaguing most modern superhero comics, an element which he sees as contributing to their rapid decline (with which I agree completely). Understand, this man was a devoted reader of those same comics when he was a youngster.

But this is where he made a mistake, and one so unfortunately common to people unfamiliar with the modern Anglophone comics industry, which he most certainly isn't. He referred to all US mainstream comics as superhero comics.

Now, you may call this a point of semantics, but it gave me pause to consider how easily this sort of observation is made. Mainstream = superhero = bad. I'm not going to go off on a 'kill the superheroes' rant here; this is something even more worrying to me.

'I don't read superhero comics. I still spend £20 a week on comics.' It's often argued that the independent, or 'indy', works in comics are never given enough exposure; that they're suffocated by mainstream tat. True enough, as far as it goes.

But here's the crunch: I don't read superhero comics. Many of you will already know that. What you probably don't know is that I still manage to spend an average of twenty English pounds a week on comics...and most of them very definitely fall into this narrow-minded definition of 'US Mainstream'.

I know there are quite a few people out there who won't touch anything with a glossy cover. A few more who won't go near Previews, and some who wouldn't be seen dead within ten feet of anything in colour.

If you're of a like mind, and bearing in mind my own general anti-spandex feelings, I ask you - what kind of bizarre, blinkered world do you live in?

I mean, I love a good black and white indy as much as the next guy. I grew up on black and whites -something I'm going to cover in a later column. But this weird and pervasive form of inverse snobbery - the idea that all works produced by mainstream publishers (i.e., the Big Four of DC, Marvel, Dark Horse and Image), or even those that look as if they were produced by mainstream publishers - are inherently bad, simply by virtue of who publishes them, is...well, nonsense. Utter nonsense.

I am certain that the reason even most self-publishers imitate the format of 'standard' comics is due to exactly this circumstance. Superhero sales, inexplicably, dominate the comics sales charts. The indy publishers therefore understandably assume that if it doesn't at least look the same as the two hundred superhero comics it's racked alongside, people will walk on by. (Leland Purvis' VOX, an anthology published at magazine size, has certainly suffered unnecessarily in this particular Format War - Purvis recently announced that VOX is changing to regular size as a direct result of this retail blindness.)

What's the mindset here? The chap I initially mentioned has an almost-valid excuse; no knowledge of the US market after about 1970. Still not entirely fair, though we'll let it slide. But when I hear avid fans, rabid comic-buyers, regular storegoers - basically people who Should Know Better - claiming that everything mainstream is shit, or even that everything mainstream is superheroes, it makes me wonder.

Even the most conservative comic shop will likely rack, at the very least, Vertigo comics. They may be on the 'top shelf', they may be tucked towards the back of the store, but they're still there, for goodness' sake.

'Do these people never look at the shelves in their store?' Do these people never bother to actually look at the shelves in their store? Do they honestly pick up their (ir)regular HATE, EIGHTBALL and BLACK HOLE from their pull-list... and then just leave? That behaviour alone, I find odd. But again, that's a subject for another day.

I can see what's happening here. It's in colour, it's glossy, and therefore it must be superheroes. That's the logic. It's also utterly, utterly wrong.

Let's take a look at that format. Chances are, if you can tick off at least two of the following, then it falls into that category and thus gets ignored:

- Published by the Big Four
- Colour covers
- Regular size
- Retails for around $2.95 US

Guess what? That covers around ninety percent of all the comics being published in the Western market. In fact, it probably covers your copy of BLACK HOLE, too. Charles Burns, 'mainstream'? The horror!

I'm serious. If we're going to use the word at all, then 'mainstream' should apply to content. But in comics, big surprise, it's all half-cocked. The domination of the 32-page colour superhero comic is already strong enough to ensure many otherwise-intelligent people refer to comics as a 'genre', when what they actually mean is the 'superhero genre' within the medium of comics. Now it appears to have gone one step further, and these same, otherwise-intelligent people honestly believe that anything out there which isn't black and white, oversized/undersized and costs fifteen dollars for twenty pages is mainstream - therefore superheroes - therefore bad.

How on earth can people make this distinction so carelessly? We can't apply this same definition to other media in any meaningful way, so why comics?

Let's take novels as an example. Well, most novels are sold in high street stores, have an ISBN number, are supplied through a recognised distributor and generally don't contain state-of-the-art microchip-controlled pop-up technology (Apart from Uri Geller's latest book. I wish I was joking). They're sold on the same shelves as everyone else. Are all novels mainstream?

How about TV? A pretty good comparison to comics in many ways, but particularly with regards to distribution and format. A show may have been made on a budget of five hundred quid and a bottle of whiskey; it's still running alongside everyone else's program. It's on the same channels people always go to for their TV fix. But just because you can't stand FRIENDS, would you tar KIDS IN THE HALL with the same brush?

And so with probably ninety percent of all comics published today. They're distributed through all the normal channels (or should that be channel, singular...), they share the same format and similar retail price as everyone else, and - in theory at least - people have the same access to the material as any other work.

'Works of good quality, all from a 'mainstream' publisher.' Now think about that definition of 'mainstream', and just how silly it is. If you are one of those people who won't buy anything that doesn't look like it was put together with a sharpie pen and a Xerox machine, you are missing a shitload of really good stuff.

DC's Vertigo line is an obvious example here: 100 BULLETS. TRANSMETROPOLITAN. HELLBLAZER (If we allow ourselves a peek into the past we also find PREACHER, INVISIBLES, and of course SANDMAN). Works of bloody good quality, all very distinct and all from a 'mainstream' publisher.

Image, especially recently, have started to eat into my wallet more and more with every passing month as books like POWERS, MINISTRY OF SPACE and OBERGEIST (yes, even Top Cow for goodness' sake) appear.

Dark Horse, as always, have their multiple licensed-franchise operations going, but their Maverick line is the one to watch on this score. USAGI YOJIMBO. SIN CITY. HELLBOY.

And the list goes on; Oni Press, regardless of where it appears in Previews (even though the Big Four's positioning has more to do with finances and contracts than genre or quality), publishes almost nothing outside of the standard comics format, and there's no reason it should. Caliber, Avatar Press, Sirius, Radio Comix, the manga steamroller that is Viz... Can you see where this is headed?

Consider this a plea to the people out there who constantly deride 'the mainstream' as rubbish. (They are, presumably, the same people who refuse to read any book that has ever had a good review, or refuse to see any movie that isn't showing in cinemas where you can still smoke.)

All I ask is, take another look. Take some time and actually browse around those shelves. Don't worry about picking up something with colour artwork: the staff aren't going to laugh at you. Go on, have a look around.

Because you're missing out. And it's all your own fault.

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.