A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Wheeler wrote a column for this site defending Rich Johnston. I'm not going to rehash that column here, since you can read Andrew's piece for yourself, and I agree with all of it.

Actually, I've always found the attitude that some professionals have towards Rich to be slightly amusing. The people working in every other mass medium would kill to have a world where the worst they had to worry about was an annoying hobbyist in London. It's fair enough that people find him irritating; life is full of little irritants, and if you work in comics, Rich must surely qualify. But more than a few pros seem to feel fundamentally wronged by the very existence of such a column. Which strikes me as a little oversensitive.

It reflects, I suspect, the cottage industry mentality of the comics business. It's not meant to be like other industries with their nasty little gossip columnists and tabloid rumour mills. It's not like TV or films. It's meant to be a cuddly overgrown convention where hobbyists and pros unite in glorious love of the medium. This is utter nonsense, of course. But this rose tinted view still seems to influence the way many people see the industry, with every deviation being viewed as somehow deeply wrong. Perhaps it's influenced by the days when all we knew of the rest of the audience was the breathless enthusiasm of letter columns.

'Comics is meant to be an overgrown convention where hobbyists and pros unite.' All of which is bringing me, in a roundabout way, to the actual subject. One of the oddities of the comics industry is that, while its cottage industry self-image may be a bit distorted, it's not wholly without truth. Every form of entertainment has online fandoms, of course, but comics seem remarkable in the extent to which big names and prominent editors participate. And when the internet doesn't like something, it isn't shy about making its views known.

In a recent article at Newsarama, Joe Quesada and Brian Bendis discussed just how big online fandom actually is. As they rightly point out, online fandom is hopelessly unrepresentative. If the comics that actually sold reflected internet tastes then the industry would be a wildly different place, and Rob Liefeld would be flipping burgers. Anyone who's worked on a top-selling title that the internet hated is probably entitled to assume that the internet is just being unrepresentative again. After all, somebody must like it if it's selling that well.

On the other hand, just how big is the online community? Quesada and Bendis exchange figures and come up with the view that, including lurkers, it's probably something around 10,000. As Bendis points out, "Any of the high profile boards you go to... you rarely see a hit count pop over 10k."

I think they're on the low side there. For one thing, if you're getting 10,000 hits on several individual sites, then unless everyone is reading every site, there have to be more than 10,000 people out there. For another, I know how many people read the X-Axis, and I just can't believe that I get that big a proportion of the total readership. My reviews usually get between 3-4,000 hits in their first week, on top of which there's a mailing list version with 950 subscribers. Last week's YOUNG AVENGERS review did 4,844 hits in its first six days.

'If the comics that sold reflected internet tastes, Rob Liefeld would be flipping burgers.' Now, granted, there are links to my site here and on my monthly Pulse column. But I don't exactly go out of my way to promote it, and as a one-subject site, I'd have thought it would have rather niche appeal. I cannot begin to accept that over 40% of Internet fandom reads my X-Men reviews. That's just silly.

Besides, even if the number was 10,000, it would still be significant. It may not seem like much compared with top selling books like IDENTITY CRISIS, but when you get further down the charts, it starts to be a lot more significant. By the time you're out of the top 50, you're down to 32,000 readers. Out of the top 100, you're down to 17,000. STOKER'S DRACULA #3 only sold around 10,000 copies, and that was number 130 on the January charts.

So, sure, the internet may be unrepresentative of the total audience, but given the state of the market, those 10,000 - or probably more - are still worth having. A book like QUEEN & COUNTRY only does around 5-6,000 copies in the direct market. It's got the trade paperback sales as well, but for books at that level, the internet is a pretty damned big audience.

Of course, a large chunk of those 10,000 are lurkers; there's certainly a much smaller pool who actually post their opinions. Still, I suspect it works something like this. The internet audience skews heavily towards the more hardcore and devoted fans - those who actually post, even more so. Consequently, we are hopelessly unrepresentative when it comes to the top sellers that sell to the more casual Wizard audience. But we get a lot more representative of the audience the further you go down the charts. Because the audiences of those books also skew heavily towards the more hardcore and devoted fans. They're the only ones who can be bothered hunting them down and buying them.

'The internet may be unrepresentative, but that audience is still worth having.' It's easy, and understandably tempting, to dismiss a lot of internet opinion as meaningless ranting. Let's be honest, that's what most of it is. On the other hand, some people seem to have unrealistic expectations from their audience feedback. "Your comic sucks" is not a very constructive comment. It isn't a valid piece of literary criticism, because it lacks reasoning. But it is a valid opinion. The audience react how they react. If they're not entertained, if they find the book boring or incomprehensible... well, those are the facts. When bands get bottled off or comedians die on stage, they don't get to lecture the audience for giving inadequate reasons.

It's not the audience's job to tell you where you went wrong. Nor, for that matter, is the audience obliged to pore over some throwaway superhero crossover in hopes of deciphering a gratuitously oblique plot, whatever some writers seem to think.

Come to think of it, can I mention a pet irritant of mine? "If you don't like it, don't buy it" is excellent advice. However, it is also frequently wheeled out as an answer to criticism. And as an answer to criticism, it's utterly facile. What will happen if I don't buy it? Will the dialogue improve? Will the artist learn perspective? Will the plot holes heal up? It's not like there's some rule of quantum physics whereby a comic only sucks when people look at it, for heaven's sake.

There is no such thing as an invalid reaction. If the readers think the book sucks, it's no answer to turn round and tell them that their opinion is inadequately reasoned. It's still their opinion. It might be expressed in an uninformative and rather boring way, but it's an opinion nonetheless.

The internet is certainly unrepresentative, but not so unrepresentative that it can be safely ignored - especially outside the first and second tier titles. And it may often be angry and inarticulate, but it's still customer feedback. It beats silence. Sure, it has to be kept in its proper perspective. But that doesn't mean rationalising it all away, however tempting it may often be.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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