Something I care a great deal about is right on the precipice — and at a time when its identity is more popular than ever.

I speak of the comic book.

Growing up, I learned a lot from them, including the basics of storytelling, acceptance of others, and wonder at the universe, and they gave me a lot of joy. But it pains me to see that just about nobody buys them any more. Comic books are mostly unseen, hard to find, expensive to purchase, and also difficult to get into because of convoluted and interwoven back stories that scare away all newcomers.

While comic-book characters rule screens around the world, as demonstrated again just this week with the out-of-this-world success of “Captain Marvel,” grossing over $150,000,000 in its opening weekend, titles of big-name characters from Marvel (which spawned Captain Marvel, as well as Spider-Man, the Avengers, Black Panther and countless others) and DC (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.) rarely scrape together 100,000 unit sales. In fact, many of today’s comics from the big two publishers linger down around 20,000 sales or lower. I have tried, more than once, to pencil out just how a Marvel comic book selling under 20,000 copies is sustainable. The answer:  It’s not. But then, none of them are.

Here’s something else that isn’t happening. All of those movie (and TV) fans of these Marvel and DC heroes and villains? They’re not turning into buyers of comics. The movies have replaced the comic books.

Gerry Conway, who in the 1970s and ’80s wrote just about every major DC and Marvel character (and in the process killed off Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy, and created The Punisher, Firestorm, and several other significant characters) lays out a lot of the problem in this post on his blog:

On the one hand, you have superhero mythology in mainstream media– a mass market appealing to millions upon millions of consumers world wide, a potential audience beyond anything imagined by comic book creators half a century ago in our most weed-enhanced fantasies. And on the other hand, you have superhero publishing in the direct market– a shrinking niche market numbering in at most a hundred thousand, dominated by a core readership of a few thousand, whose financial support is strained to the breaking point and beyond by ruthless and extortionate marketing of low-value-added gimmick publications that thwart long term emotional investment.

He also proposes a solution:  Recognize that that the money, and the interest, in comics is actually an interest in the characters and the stories — in the intellectual property — and that the companies should just use comics creation to foster creativity accessible in other media.

… But, I would ask… isn’t that what’s already happening?

Last week, just before I came across Conway’s blog post, I happened to read a 10-point prescription from comic-book-store owner Brian Hibbs on how to save the comic-book industry. Here it is.  For the most part, Hibbs wants the direct distributor of comic books, Diamond Comic Distributors, to change a lot of its terms, and his fellow comics retailers to stop falling victim to all sorts of sales schemes intended to extract more money from the wallets of an ever-dwindling supply of comics buyers.

His viewpoint is shared by the four people who sat on a panel I sat in on this past weekend at San Diego Comic Fest. The panel was called “What’s Wrong with Comics and How Can We Fix it?” The retailer on the panel, who doubled as the moderator, said that there were two perceived problems with comics:  content and cover price (the lowest cover price is now $3.99 — and $7.99 is not unique), but that it was “naive” for anyone to think that the cover price was going to drop, so he immediately took that off the table. He too blamed Diamond, but also added that DC and Marvel don’t make it easy for new readers to enter the market, and they should make it easier to navigate which publications are entry-level for people who come into comic-book stores and don’t know what to buy. Other panelists agreed in various ways. Finally, I put up my hand, and said something like this:

“All of your proposed solutions are related to comic-book stores. Comic-book stores are a subset of book stores. They are specialty book stores. Last week, Samuel French, the specialty book store devoted to theatre, film, and television, closed all of its stores. [Note: They still have one inside a theatre in London, England.] Barnes & Noble is going out of business. Even the porn bookstore in West Hollywood just went out of business! Book stores aren’t going to be around. The solution to the problem with comic books isn’t going to come from comic-book stores. When’s the last time you had a new customer come into a comic-book store?”

They chattered about this for a while, and much of the subsequent discussion from the audience and the panel revolved around my statement, and then about 20 minutes later, someone else on the panel turned back to me and said, “No one up here answered your question, did they?” And I said no, they hadn’t.

Before the panel, I had gone out to the exhibit hall — what, back in the 1970s we used to call the dealers room — and wound up chatting with a middle-aged guy named Koop who was selling comics from the Silver Age. I asked him where he was from, and guessed correctly — it’s hard to mask a Pittsburgh accent — but he’s lived in Arizona for decades. Koop said that selling comics is his hobby, and it’s a lot of fun, but the rest of the time he’s a database administrator. We talked about comic-book shows of the 1970s and people we used to know in common, and I told him that I now realize what a good father I had because he was willing to take me when I was 12 years old to New York City in 1975 at great expense and inconvenience because he knew how much the chance to go to a comic-book convention — my first! — meant to me. He took me the following year, too, and we stayed over, and the year after that I got to take a friend as well. After that, I was selling comics at conventions and hiring friends or, later, my niece to work for me.

“You must be around my age,” Koop said, and we figured out that I am. His father wouldn’t take him to that convention in New York City, so he didn’t get to start going to conventions until he was older. I shared with him the story of how my father and I met legendary Disney artist Carl Barks, the creator of Uncle Scrooge, at a small convention in central New Jersey when I was about 15. Barks had brought one of his paintings of the Disney ducks to auction off, and it had gone for $3,000 on the spot. “THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS!?!?!” my father exclaimed loudly. “I was just having a beer with that guy in the bar!”

Koop loved that story — what comics fan wouldn’t? — and noted just how much $3,000 was in the 1970s. I pulled a bunch of bagged-and-boarded ACG comics from the mid-60s out of one of his long boxes and when he saw what I’d fished out, Koop said, “Ahh… great Kurt Schaffenberger covers!”

“Nobody else is going to appreciate these,” I said. “None of this. When we’re gone, the hobby’s gone. There’s nobody after us.”

Just then, a guy in his 30’s next to me said that his son, aged 12, was here in the room and loving every minute of the convention. I’m still doubtful that that kid is ever going to develop a love for Silver Age and Bronze Age comic books, but it was nice to hear.

I took the ACG comics, and two DCs, all from 1965 to 1971, and paid Koop $55. He cut me a break on the price, and it felt to me like a steal.

If comic books have a future, it won’t be as periodicals. Will they even be in print? I don’t know. I’m glad they’re here while I’m here. I don’t expect things to last forever, and I don’t hold onto the past.

Although I do plan to hold onto my comic books.

I do not like Paul Manafort.

I do not like his kind or sort.

I do not like himself or his’n,

I would not like him out of prison.

Paul Manafort is a bad actor,

which the judge failed to factor.

I think his sentence far too light,

And think that on this I’m quite right:

that he should spend his days in jail

and never live to tell the tale.

Okay, I now know who Jussie Smollett is. He’s a guy who may go to prison for three years for telling serious lies.

Which in other hands would make him presidential material.

When a guy I know through Facebook posted the story above, from 1989, I commented, “At this point, I have to let the 30-year-old crimes go. There are so many new ones every day that it’s hard to keep up.”

“It’s about the Jussie Smollett story,” he said.

Oh, sure, I thought:  What’s the Jussie Smollett story?

I looked it up, still didn’t grasp the full impact of what he was trying to get at, and moved on.

That’s what happens when you more or less take the weekend off from the internet.

Sure, I dipped in here and there (I felt compelled to note, for myself at least, that celebrating Presidents Day didn’t mean I celebrated all Presidents… and far from it), but for the most part, the long weekend was spent catching up on comic books, writing, going to the gym, running my playwriting workshop, exterminating super mutants in “Fallout 4” and reading the newspaper — in print. And here’s what happens when you set social media aside even just for three days and then come back: Suddenly, you recognize very little.

Most of what’s trending on Twitter will never wind up in the newspaper, and that’s fine. But the real insight is this:  What’s trending is fleeting, but because most of the trend is tied to outrage, and there’s always something new trending, the outrage is constant. Marshall McLuhan’s statement that the medium is the message was never so true.

Some of the people I follow on Twitter are professionally outraged. I don’t mind the act when it’s Lewis Black doing it for laughs; I feel differently when it’s some professional CNN guest pumping people up to sell his latest book. The one guy did a livestream of his appearance on CNN, so all you’re seeing is his side — and what I saw was a trained monkey grinning at the host and punching up his own one-liners. Yes, he purports to be some sort of journalist, and yes, he’s got a new book, but that book is just a collection of his outraged posts and opinions. That’s not a journalist — that’s a late-night comic who isn’t funny.

Catching up, it seems that Jussie Smollett is now accused of having fabricated his story of being assaulted in a hate crime, and then the fake journalists over on Fox were having a laugh about that, but then Smollett strongly denied having fabricated the story. And Smollett appears to be an actor on some show I’ve never seen and had never heard of.

This seems as good a time as any to post a cartoon I also found on Facebook. It applies to more than just television screens.

I’m not going to be reading the memoir by Chris Christie, the former governor of my birth state, but I’m sure glad Matt Taibbi did. Here’s his blistering look at the book, and at just how the self-believed master negotiator Christie got so thoroughly strung along by Donald Trump. (Like, well, millions of other people.)

It’s fun to read this takedown of Chris Christie, who has deluded himself into believing he still has a shot at the presidency, but it can’t have been fun for Garden Staters to live through his governorship. Last I checked, the people of New Jersey remain divided on Chris Christie — split between those who hate him and those who plain loathe him. That’s what happens when you do things like close the state beaches to everyone — except yourself and your family.

When I was picking up my dry cleaning yesterday, the young woman asked me what my Super Bowl plans were.

“Not watching it,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s the best answer I’ve gotten yet!”

I hadn’t even been aware that it was going to held this weekend. On Friday, I happened to be listening to the radio in my car — and who does that, when he’s got a full streaming set of Pere Ubu? But I guess occasionally it happens — when some “news” piece came on about the big game. So that’s when I found out it was happening.

A couple of months ago, my family and I went to see the fantastic King Tut exhibit downtown at the Science Center. As we were parking the car, we saw all sorts of signage everywhere announcing the “Los Angeles Rams.”

“The ‘LOS ANGELES’ Rams?” I asked. It sounded strange coming off my tongue.

“Are they here now?” my wife asked. “When did they move here?”

Our two sons  didn’t know either. Finally, we asked a passerby who explained the team’s recent move. But still, we couldn’t figure where they had come from. We kept trying out other, former, names. “The Minneapolis Rams?” “The Oakland Rams?” “The St. Louis Rams?” None of them sounded right.

Later, we forgot about it. We just didn’t care enough.

Still, my wife had the best case of cultural unawareness. As we left the Science Center hours later, we came onto the plaza in the back, which abuts the back of the Coliseum, better known as the LA Coliseum. It seems more than 75,000 people.

“When did they build that?” she demanded. She was staring at all the Rams signage that was now all over it.

“About a hundred years ago.”

“No way!” she said. “I would have seen it before!”

Given that today is that Super Bowl, which promises to preoccupy many people now in the hometown of the Rams (wherever they just came from), my plan is to do grocery shopping right when the game starts. I’m betting I can cut the checkout time in half! So… see you later!

The world is full of them. In fact, it’s most people. Don’t let Twitter — or anyone — convince you otherwise.

In today’s installment, we look at a woman in Chicago who personally paid to rent hotel rooms for homeless people who otherwise might have frozen to death. She charged 20 hotel rooms to her American Express card, and then other people joined her in this impromptu campaign. She never sought any publicity or any recognition, but I’m glad to share her name:  Candice Payne.

Here’s more about what she did.

Last night, I saw Elton John on his stop here in Los Angeles in his multi-date sold-our performances at the Staples Center as part of his “Farewell, Yellow Brick Road” tour, billed as Elton’s final tour. He wants to spend more time with his children, he told us from the stage, adding that this would be his last time playing the Staples Center.

True.

Of course, he’s playing the also-in-Los-Angeles Forum tomorrow night. And the night after. And again. And then, yes, he’ll be touring the world for another two years, including a couple more stops back here in LA with multiple play dates each time. By the time he’s done with this tour, those kids won’t want to spend any time with him anyway. (I speak from experience.) But, no, he won’t be returning to the Staples Center. I came away from the concert liking Elton, but also thinking that he’s so good at splitting hairs that maybe he should be an economist.

I’m not really an Elton John fan. My wife’s a fan and so we went, and we had a fantastic time at the show, but I’ve never much cared for his music. I don’t like the songs that are too saccharine, and I actively hate the ones that to me sound like they’re perfect for playing at roller rinks. (“Crocodile Rock” typifies that sort.) In concert, he largely avoided the type I hate, and the saccharine ones were fortified with strong musicianship from his band. When the band took the stage, I wondered why Elton John needed three drummers. I found out. To my immense surprise, Elton in concert proved to be a rock and roll show, and a highly enjoyable one at that. He’s singing in a lower key these days, which in addition to keeping the songs singable by him, produces the further benefit of making the vocals sound bluesier. Attaching a powerful band to that — and Elton has a very powerful band — adds punch.

I looked it up, and Elton will be 72 in March. He looks good, although overstuffed, and is a generous performer. He played for three hours, apologized for not being able to play every hit (he’s had 50 songs in the U.S. top 40), and not only routinely left his piano to make bows and gestures from each and every corner of the stage in appreciation to all members of the audience in those far-flung corners, but also rode the piano around to various locations of the stage as one would a hovercraft. He’s a true showman.

By the time this tour wraps up, Elton John will be just shy of 74. My wife and I have concert tickets for two other shows this year:  Bryan Ferry in the late summer, and the Who in October. Just after we see him, Ferry will hit 74, Pete Townshend will also be 74, and Roger Daltrey will be 75. In this crowd, Elton John is a whippersnapper.

Valorie says we’d better find some younger bands to like, because these guys are going to be dead soon. I do have younger bands I like — hello, Broken Bells, where’s your new album and tour? Gnarls Barkley, are you still out there? TV on the Radio, what’s up? — but now seems a good time to express immense gratitude that the members of Pere Ubu are only in their 50s and 60s.

On the way to a party Saturday night, my wife told me a story in the car about some system she has to use at work. It was a long and complicated tale, and I tried to follow it, but once she said “DOS” I couldn’t follow any of it any more.

That’s because she said DAWSS and that’s how it’s correctly pronounced to me, too, and that got me thinking. Where we’re from, everyone pronounces everything correctly. It just seems to come naturally to people there to say things correctly. Unfortunately, our children, who are all California-born, have their own ideas of how things are pronounced. To them, this is probably pronounced DAHSS, even though that’s wrong, and, worse, even though I’ve told them it’s wrong.

These same children, two all grown up and one nearly so, believe that “compass” is rightly pronounced COME-pus when I know full well that it’s pronounced CAHMPus. Two of  them were snickering at me a few weeks ago when I said that something CAR-uh-lates with my experience and they said it CORE-e-lates. CORE-e-lates:  hah!

My wife and I are smart, well-educated people, and we’re certainly talkers, so I don’t know how our children wound up this way, mispronouncing everything.

The horror. (Which they pronounce HORE-ur!)