The thing is you only have to look at the broadsheet newspapers to see that there is a big push towards things such as e-book readers and extensive web content, enabling you to access anything that was once in print on a mobile gadget. You can buy new books; you can download new music and video (you either pay for it or not), you can social network with all your friends via Facebook or Bebo. In fact, you can live your entire life behind a keypad if you really want to. So the logical step is to attempt to make something that has always been free a paying concern. Oddly enough, I have some experience at this. This brings us back to Danny Black, who I waxed about lyrically last time I could be arsed to write something here. Danny is a big fan of Hip Hop music – don’t ask, I’ve never really been able to fathom it – and he was devastated by the news that a magazine he’d read religiously for 21 years – Hip Hop Connection – had been cancelled and replaced by… wait for it… a PDF version, downloadable or readable from the magazine’s extant website. I don’t know if they’re charging for it because Danny spent much of this correspondence massaging my ego for me, by suggesting that yet again it has been proved that Borderline was, if nothing else, innovative.

However, I disagree in many ways with that way of thinking. Borderline worked as a freebie, but it would never have worked, not even today, as a paid for item. The fact that less than 1% of the existing readership actually parted company with the ONE DOLLAR that was asked for, proves, to me at least, that with so many comics related website all over the world, there is no reason to pay for something that you can get elsewhere for free.

You could of course attempt to do what DC tried in the late 1990s and stop fans from having web-pages honouring their characters because of copyright infringement – how to win fans and influence true believers, eh? I’ll bet the boys at DC loved the fact they were targeting their own fans with the threats of lawsuits. Murdoch could do this with News International sites; he could bar other websites, through legal injunctions, from them using exclusive on line content. It could be enforced with such things such as celebrity interviews and sleaze, but how can you copyright a news story? By being the first person to reveal a news story doesn’t make it your own. Oddly enough I have experience of this as well…

How could Murdoch and his team of experts prevent their content from being used when every other entertainment media is constantly failing to stop piracy? One visit to one of the torrent sites and you’ll see that the moment something is released there’s a pirate copy waiting for all those people who really can’t be arsed to go to the cinema or the local DVD store. If Murdoch slapped threats on all his pictures and stories, someone will lift it and by the time Murdoch’s lawyers had caught up with the culprit there’ll be 250,000 copies of original piece in circulation and growing faster than the threat of swine flu.

The Internet doesn’t have the same loyalty value as print does either. I remember I bought the Mirror for years out of brand loyalty. I hated what the newspaper had turned into, but I read The Mirror so I carried on reading it. Finally, I saw the light and I dumped it and bought an independently oriented broadsheet. You might be the kind of guy that visits Comic Book Resources or even The Comics Village religiously; but if the standard starts to slip, or they concentrate for weeks on things that don’t really interest you, you are far more easily swayed to go in search of an alternative and when you do that you start to see that most comics web sites have the same content, feature the same news, the same features, the same interviews (just conducted by someone else because whoever is being interviewed is promoting something and is therefore doing the circuit) and the same old bollocks. Some might just lift stuff from other sites with no remorse or credit, others might go into more depth or reproduce the story in a refreshing way; but the bottom line is that on-line content is inferior to the stuff you can hold in your hands. With so many websites and so little quality control, comics’ affair with the Internet has failed in many ways to be the success it should have been.

There was a time when the only way for fans to communicate was either via fanzines or letters (pieces of paper with handwriting or type on them, sent via an envelope and delivered by that man in shorts who stuffs junk through the hole in your front door that you’ve always wondered what it was there for…). You could count the number of fanzines on two hands and they ranged from semi-professional to decidedly amateurish. News was disseminated so slowly that by the time you heard some of the news, it was already past history for our chums Stateside. The fact that some comics magazines remain to this day is probably more of a testament to the tenacity of diehard fans rather than to the magazine offering anything that can’t be obtained free of charge through a USB.

The Internet was a godsend for the almost non-existent world of comics fandom when it first appeared. There were so many fans out there who wanted to share their opinions and there was no way to achieve this. Fanzines were dead and the ones that persevered discovered that comics fans are very apathetic, possibly the most apathetic in the long history of fans. Then you could join one of those new fangled bulletin boards or hang around a comics forum on Compuserve and possibly meet and chat to another fan, or, even in those days, see a writer or artist flexing his newly acquired Internet muscles. And even then, in the early days of this fantastic new immediate media, you’d get arseholes who would cause more harm than good by basically being arseholes (that’ll be me then…) and you’d get people who saw the Internet as something new and innovative that could be used to the advantage of comics fans everywhere.

The problem is with comics fans is, a lot of the most prominent are also complete and utter wankers. Little Hitlers with egos the size of Ego the Living Planet, who because they are nothing more than frustrated fanzine editors created great concepts and then ruined them by controlling the place like it was their private little kingdom and unless you do and say as I do and say then you will be castigated, defenestrated and then cast to the lions that are my sad followers. That started really early and continues to this day. Depending on your level of cool, you have more or less acolytes. For every great website that sprung up in the 90s there were others that just took the piss and this was when people started to talk about what Rupert Murdoch wants to do. Not getting you to pay for your entertainment, but getting shitty about people using your content.

The net was always going to cause this problem – you can’t have a medium such as the Internet without things being replicated. It’s viral, man.

When I was at Comicus Internationalus, in its pre-historic days, we got embroiled in a controversy with Michael Doran and his newly created Newsaramalamadingdong site. He continually accused us of using HIS news stories in CI. Despite the fact that HIS news stories were actually general news stories, released by the comics companies or by creators. Our reproduction of HIS news stories normally happened about two weeks after he broke the stories, by which time umpteen thousand fan sites had already dissected much of it. His argument was that we often used quotes that he had gotten personally from the creator involved, thus proving that we were stealing HIS stories. We tried to explain to him that there were only so many ways of calling a cow a cow and that creators, even in those days, had long lists of stock answers for general questions. Mike Conroy discovered this a few years later when interviewing someone about their new project and vast tracts of comments made by the writer had been made verbatim in another magazine. The arrival of the Internet made creators aware that they were about to be baptised in a new form of adulation and some of them were actually prepared for it.

Doran’s problem was personal. He felt that because he was on the ball and getting news stories slightly ahead of everyone else that he should be treated as importantly as the news story. It was, after all, HIS news story; he’d worked for it. Damn, Woodward and Bernstein must have been sick as pigs when they discovered that the story they uncovered was reported all over the world, by other journalists!!! I’m not suggesting for a second that CI didn’t steal some of his news stories; we did. The same way we changed boring generic press releases into worthwhile news stories, by following up on them. Of course, it was Richard Johnston’s fault this clash happened in the first place. Rich used to lift huge chunks of CI and post it on the newsgroups (and always credited us, bless him), so this was how Doran found out about it in the first place.

Nowadays, this kind of bollocks wouldn’t happen, especially not for something as insignificant as a change of artist or writer. What Doran didn’t understand was that he and us were in this business to promote comicbooks, not ourselves. When the originator begins to think he is more important than the news he accumulates, then there’s going to be problems ahead. This is why paid-for-content will never work. News International might have massive financial clout, but it’ll soon start to be drained when they pursue ‘thieves’ and discover they’re a bunch of 18 year olds with blogs and no income. They shut them down and two more pop up. The net, if nothing else, brings tenacity and the obstinate out of many people. It’s free! It’s uncensored! You try and stop that and we’ll crush you under the weight of freedom!

The Internet has, ultimately, ended up being a not too good thing for the comics industry. The very nature of the medium relies on you spending your money on the comic or tradepaperback; the last thing it wants is for you to see much of the thing that is going to pay the artists for free. You can obtain all the latest releases via bit torrents if you want to read a comic on your PC (but that would have happened regardless) and there are so many websites that they all tend to blur into each other. There is something like 1million blogs dedicated to comics! Word of mouth is a great way of selling your product, but when only a handful of sites get more than a hundred hits a week then you can’t really gauge it.

Comicbook websites condone bad English; they perpetuate mistakes; they have no strict editorial policies that set them apart from others; they are (ahem) too opinionated where they shouldn’t be and yes, that sounds very much like most fanzines of the 1970s; but, trust me, as an editor who has struggled with the English language all my life, you have to present as close to perfect a product as you can or you shouldn’t even be proud of your achievement. The best fanzines of the 1970s were the ones where the editor took a strong editorial role – he made the grammar good, he polished the turds and he made it look presentable. The pinnacle for fanzine editors was that (semi)professional look. It didn’t matter if your magazine looked the bees knees, if it read like a 15 year old dyslexic chimp had written it, then you had FAILED!

Even the better comics website have destroyed the myth that the bigger you are the better you are. Take my old mate Richard Johnston’s Lying in the Gutter; one of the most popular columns ever to grace the Internet and yet Rich cannot edit himself and there’s no one at CBR who would. Subsequently, many of his columns read worse than some of my worst drunken late night rants. I know what he did, he writes his column, it exhausts him, so he really can’t be arsed to give it more than a cursory once over (or glance) before uploading it to his adoring fans. I’m going to do the same with this, just perpetuating my own argument.

What the majority of comics websites and blogs do is what I’ve been accusing most of you of doing for the last 18 months; they don’t enhance the image of comics. Even the more hip and trendy blogs, that use <gasp> bad language and have a slightly punk vibe do nothing for comics. Comicbooks and their industry are atrophying, all websites do is hurry that process along rather than help breath life into it. Even a word perfect, beautifully designed website that encompassed every aspect of comics would fail; because to be able to achieve such a beast you’d need to pay the people who put it together, which means you’d have to charge for people to read it and none of you have much of a quality threshold any more, so even if you actually had some disposable income, you’d spend it elsewhere.

… This column is dedicated to Joe, who hassled me about writing another column so soon after the last one.

… I discovered a great rock band a few weeks ago, one that I’ve come to consider as a new kind of rock music – Nerd Rock. Amplifier come from Manchester, have an epic sound that could encompass all manner of genres and a lot of their songs appear to themed around SF, comics, fantasy, space exploration and gods (I’m also pretty sure they mention kitchens somewhere) and frankly, they are no where near as naff as my description makes them sound. If you use Spotify them type their name into the search engine and check out the albums: Amplifier, Insider, and the two EPs, the second being called The Astronaut Dismantles HAL.

… If you’re voting in the European and Council Elections on Thursday, remember – the only way to get the arseholes in power (and I mean Labour, Conservative and even Liberals) is to vote for another party – such as Green (but not BNP). Let the politicians know that you won’t stand for this bullshit any longer!

… I now return you to your normal schedule.

Phil Hall