There was a period of time, sometime around age eleven, twelve, when I graduated from merely haunting the spinner racks at the local Town & Country to being a hardcore comics fan. We had moved for the first time to a town with a mall (Enid, Oklahoma - the Oakwood Mall, to be precise) and in this mall there were not one, but two chain bookstores, Waldenbooks and B Daltons. For much the same reasons that we favor Coke over Pepsi and Dallas over Dynasty, I gravitated towards the Waldenbooks which, in addition to Dungeons and Dragons modules that I was afraid to open at that point for fear of demonic possession, carried their own, well-stocked spinner rack full of comics.

More important than my comics acquisitions from that store, which ranged from progressive to puerile even for a young lad that was still pretty much afraid of his own shadow, was a marvellous tome that would open me up to a whole world of comics I'd never even considered, namely THE OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PRICE GUIDE.

At that fertile time in every child's life when they find something that is distinctly their own and commit every nuanced detail to memory as if death were the price for failure in a pop quiz that they know is coming, I found comics' long and storied history dissected and laid out for all to study within the pages of that hallowed book.

Sacrificing the provincial awareness that had protected my young mind from the inherent paradox that lay within the idea of a SUPERMAN/SPIDER-MAN crossover, I gave myself over to a wild new archaeology that reached back beyond the birth of my own grandmother - who was, if not the oldest person in the world, certainly a representative sample.

'OVERSTREET is presented for children - or perhaps the child-like mind.' Of course, entire decades have passed since those first heady days of suddenly knowing way more about something than anyone in my household ever cared to hear. While that may not have changed much, my perceptions of comics, and OVERSTREET, has.

This self-styled "price guide" for all its meticulous listings of every printing of CLASSIC ILLUSTRATED #21, a snazzy little number entitled 3 FAMOUS MYSTERIES that saw repackaging a mere seven times, and for all its cataloguing of all the covers for BATTLE CHASERS #1 (five, if you include the reprint) is not a complete listing of comics past. As a budding scholar of comics, I either mistakenly assumed that a volume that smacked of such totality would present a view of comics that was both balanced and comprehensive or, more likely, it simply never occurred to me to be interested in comics other than the ones offered, because they were all I knew.

It wasn't until I started working at a comics store as an adult, becoming actively involved in the ordering and selling of comics other than WOLVERINE, that the disparities between the world presented to my younger self by the OVERSTREET guide and the progressively fascinating one that I now worked in became more readily apparent. It is a book presented, content-wise, for children (or perhaps the child-like mind) with the "classic" comics that contain dangerous adult, themes helpfully marked as such as a pinch-hit concordance for Fredrick Wertham's cautionary missive on the deadly consequences of comics gone wrong, SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT.

There is a period after which OVERSTREET doesn't list any comic that:

a) did not feature a costumed adventurer, heroic or otherwise, or else...

b) was not published by a company that made their real money telling stories about costumed adventurers or (in one more modern case) from movie franchises adapted to comics

'It's difficult to think of another vital medium that suffers the same degree of segregation.' This mainstream aesthetic that is cultivated by ignoring specific segments of comics over the last thirty years is, not surprisingly, one that reinforces a specific set of values that are overwhelmingly male, Caucasian, and Judeo-Christian, in that order. The values that hover at the fringes of the mainstream, then, represent minority voices in comics that are, at present, unable to assimilate with the body of comics as a whole, due to resistance from the centre mass, a mainstream that has engulfed a tradition of great depth and which refuses entry, in gradations, to that material which does not share its particular worldview.

In this capacity, the aforementioned price guide is part of a complex of disinformation that projects a false image of what comics is, reinforcing a particular world-view that many potential readers do not share. In the interest of promoting a wholesome face for comics to the world, they strip away all evidence of diversity and stress the homogeneity of superhero and pseudo-superhero themes in modern comics without necessarily reflecting any of those content decisions in their comprehensive sounding title.

What is needed to cultivate a more accurate perception of comics is not greater depth, which is already demonstrated by sixty-plus years of well-documented mainstream output, but span - a wider range of ideas to entice people currently apathetic to comics toward the amazing possibilities inherent to the form.

In defending the space we set aside in order to more closely consider the contribution of these neglected subjects, I offer Minority Report not as a replacement for existing comics commentary, but as a necessary supplement. There may be some who object to the idea of grouping material together for consideration based on distinctions such as the gender, race, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs of the person or persons creating it, but it is these very distinctions, even more so than superheroic themes, that often form our perception of what is mainstream (and thus financially privileged) within comics today.

'We begin to see the difficulties that minority voices must overcome.' As to the necessity of such a study, it is difficult to think of another vital medium today that suffers from the same degree of segregation. While most of comics' competitors for our collective attention (ie movies, television, video games, prose) have generally won ever-wider outlets for distribution, the story of pamphlet comics has been one of unrelenting and diminishing returns from the initial highs of the Golden Age, with its captive wartime audience of many millions, adults and children alike.

Comics found its first impulses toward diversity along with the rest of the Western culture in the late 1960s, with the freedom of the Underground press and its head shop clientele, but the subsequent relegation of the public awareness of comics to the Direct Market has created an environment where all comics must somehow manage to be shelved side-by-side without alienating any of the radically divergent groups that are potentially interested in the comics in question.

Figure in the old adage that about 90% of "alternative" comics (which for the sake of this generalisation, will nicely represent the "not mainstream") are sold in 10% of the Direct Market outlets, and we begin to see the difficulties that many of these minority voices must overcome in order to contribute to a tradition that largely denies their participation.

In other media, minority contributions have always informed - and, at times, usurped - the public notion of at least a large segment of the mainstream, with jazz and rock and roll (scandalously performed by musicians of both genders) being among the most notable. If comics is to ever become a truly popular mass medium again, its face will have to accurately reflect the mass audience of a 21st century 'global' Earth, much of which is not white, not male, and/or not Judeo-Christian.

Until comics can come to terms with the fact that its mainstream is in fact not mainstream at all, but hopelessly mired in the status quo values of the 1950s, when last it heard from the world at large, it is doomed to remain at the very least a vestigial limb of popular culture, and at most, a silent co-conspirator in the worst kind of self-inflicted ignorance.

Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and the recently released BLUESMAN: BOOK ONE.

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