Here's the latest Lying in the Gutters, from Rich Johnston. In it, he spends a great deal of time talking comic piracy, bit torrents and such. A couple thoughts.

First up, I have downloaded comics. And I will attest to the fact that things I like, I will go and add to my pull list at my local shop. I would never have picked up Strange Girl from Image otherwise, nor would I have ever ventured into Goon from Dark Horse. But now Strange Girl is on my pull list and Goon, I just bought the hardback edition of his first story arc. (Goon is brilliant, BTW, and I have no idea why someone didn't force it on me much earlier.) So there. You've got an unsolicited testimonial. With me, it's a net gain. I buy things that I download, and the stuff I didn't buy, I wasn't planning on buying anyway. Congrats.

Second up, they mention CrossGen, which around here we call Valiant 2.0 (V2). And I have no idea if they made any money in the long run off of their online presence, but V2's Comics on the Web website was awesome. For a reasonable monthly fee, you had access to their entire run. Yes, they only showed up on a staggered basis, but they were there. And you could very quickly catch up on whatever it was you were interested in. If a company was smart, they would figure out some way to make this model work.

Third up and finally, comics, for the most part, suck today. I'm sorry, if you actually dig what's going on in the DCU, you have issues. No pun intended. Murder, rape, torture–is this what passes for a "mature" comic these days? If so, we're all fucked. I haven't read a DCU comic I really enjoyed in I don't know how long. Marvel's House of M series is all right, but the spinoffs are tossoffs, really. And I can't tell you how little I'm looking forward to this idea that Xavier had some kind of deep, dark secret in the foundation of the new X-Men team (circa GS X-Men #1, if I understand it). Why the hell must everything have a deep dark secret to begin with, anyway? And the fact that a major DC comic character is going to needlessly bite it in the wake of Infinite Catharsis…oh yeah, really looking forward to that. So yeah, a lot of the Big 2's books simply aren't worth buying.

What does all of this mean? Nothing. While folks like Carla Speed McNeil and Batton Lash lead the while, the Big 2 and others will sit on their asses, produce crap, and try to sell it to you. And, sadly, a lot of you will pay them for it.