I have just finished summing up the year in comics news stories for the Journal, which prompted the following question from Gary Groth: What does it all mean? This remains an unanswered question in the published year-end review (TCJ #220) primarily because I don't know what the fuck it all means, but Gary's question reminded me that this transitional, fin-de-siecle juncture pretty much behooves one to take stock and consider the future. Gary, for example, has just finished taking stock of the '90s for his own Journal editorial and now sits in his office in a state of catatonic depression.

Personally, I never know what to say to reporters when they ask me to predict the future of the comics industry. As I ponder the question, however, at this moment of millennial reflection, four possible futures seem obvious:

Things will continue much as they are, which is to say, comics will go on catering to an obscure, cultish group of freaks and geeks, a mix of aging nostalgists, horny teen-age boys and social rebels. The comics community will be like some Beckettian protagonist forever receding into nothingness but not quite. Comics creators will continue to produce inbred, self-referential comics that are unfathomable to outsiders. This may sound like a failure of the comic-book form to realize its potential, or as Scott McCloud might say, to reinvent itself, but things could be worse. To say it's not easy to make a living in the comics field is an understatement, but there are some advantages to running under the radar screen of most corporate interests. For one thing, we get to make comics for ourselves -- and screw the rest of the world. Who cares if the local paper can't keep straight that Superman and Spider-Man don't live in the same world and People magazine refers to Stan Lee as the well-known Spider-Man artist? Who cares if the average man in the street has forgotten who Maggie and Hopey were without ever having known who they were in the first place? Our coddled corner of the Baby Boomer generation has been following Marvel's continuity so long we almost know where all the pieces of Ultron's brain have gone. We were in on the ground floor of the birth of the undergrounds and the black-and-white explosion. So what if everybody else scratches their collective head over Flaming Carrot and has the same aesthetic regard for Robert Crumb that they would for a sideshow freak? Let them get their own art form. They don't get it and they don't need to get it, because comics are for us and always have been. Which is why we can wake up tomorrow and be delighted to find that Green Lantern has had a sex-change operation or Wolverine has discovered that he is the clone of his own son. We fans will chuckle and debate the relative merits of Mr. Natural and Prof. X and we creators will do whatever we want because nobody is watching -- except us.

A snake can only swallow its own tail for so long, however, before it disappears or changes direction. The optimists of the industry, which is to say the ones with money invested, believe in the Big Breakthrough -- the hit movie, the hot website, the bestselling videogame, the Nobel Prize-winning graphic novel, the must-have action figure -- that will suddenly make the rest of the world sit up and take notice. The problem with this scenario is not so much that it couldn't happen as that it already has. Many times. The problem with a comic book entering the public consciousness via another medium is that it is invariably treated as a fad. When Batman has a hit TV show, Batman comics sell better than usual and pretty soon somebody wants to make a Wonder Woman show and a Green Hornet show. But TV shows don't last for decades the way comics titles do, and a couple of years later, Batman is gone from the screen and so are Wonder Woman and The Green Hornet and so are comic books from the public consciousness. Batman on TV didn't revitalize the comics industry any more than The Green Hornet on TV signaled a new era of radio drama. The catch is that comics can only get noticed when they're not comics, and afterward they're more unnoticed than ever.

That mention of radio drama is a grim reminder that just because something is a valid art form doesn't mean it will always have an audience. The pessimists in the industry have concluded that comic books are an artifact of the past, a quaint holdover from an era of low-tech amusements, soon to go the way of scooters and tops. When Stan Lee bragged to NPR's Morning Edition about his animated web-comics being the future of comics, McCloud pointed out to the interviewer that the products of stanlee.com are not so much comics as cheesy animation on a computer screen. Whatever success such mutations may find, it will be small consolation if it signals the passing of the modest pleasures that accrue to reading, imagining and interpreting the pages of a comic book. If I had to choose among the possible futures of the comic, it wouldn't be this one, but that may be because I'm a quaint old duck who still likes to read books and listen to vinyl records.

These three possibilities are so possible that all three could happen, one right after the other. But there remains a fourth possibility -- the least likely and most desirable.

What if all this time comics have been seeping excruciatingly slowly into the public consciousness so that one day we wake to find that it has become a form of expression, communication and entertainment like any other? In such a scenario, you might expect, no matter who you are, to find comics that make kids laugh, comics that make adults think, comics for teen-agers to jerk off to, comics that gratify a Baby Boomer's cultish demands -- in short, comics that inspire and challenge and delight a world of readers for a world of different reasons. If it is difficult to imagine the leap that would get us from this comics industry to that one, it may be because it can't be managed in a single leap. It may be a matter of gradually shifting continental plates, evolving cultural expectations. Or it may be Utopian pie in the sky that will arrive the day we see the lion lying down with the lamb and Ron Perelman entering a monastery. In any case, it's probably the only comics future worth having.

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