I distinctly remember the first comic my brother and I poured over, examining it and re-examining it until the pages fell from the tepid little staples expected to hold the magazine together for decades on end. The X-Men, and this is not being stated because of some sick promotional tie in with the movie but rather because it was the actual book we held in our hands, was an amazing story and we were catching on in year thirty of its seemingly endless life span.

The book held a lot for us. Concepts that we had difficulty explaining were easily expressed by saying, "You know what? Check out issue 200. I'm feeling what Wolvie was feeling, okay?" The X-Men in particular spoke to a certain amount of teen angst that was expected for us to feel, the two of us both being in our early teens, and even if it didn't necessarily expand our vocabulary like a good work of fiction might have, it provided a seemingly endless number of visuals we attempted to mimic in our home movies later. These things were important to us.

But sometime after the summer of '95, when the comics industry seemed to rocket through the cosmos at a breakneck speed fueled by popularity, it all just fizzled out. I had stopped reading the X-Men in favor of some of the "mature" titles the owner of our local shop was now allowing me to browse, and my brother became generally disinterested. Even though the Mature rack opened up a new and interesting selection of books which I would have never dreamed have existed, I also found myself to be more than a little disappointed by the lack of quality titles. The same was the trend that had forced me off the mainstream rack.

Somewhere along the line, the writing in comic books dipped in favor of the art which, while trendy and flashy, couldn't bear the weight of even something so simple as a twenty page comic. Instead of the eight panel page in which the art aided the point of that issue, the average book featured four two page splash pages, usually featuring an explosion or something else as dramatic, and the rest mostly two to four panels of forced cliche dialogue intended to move the reader into the next mini-poster of excitement. Where it once took a good half hour to read and digest what was in one issue soon took less than ten minutes.

A few exceptions remained. There was Optic Nerve, Preacher, Cerebus, Hellboy, and some really independent books such as Stray Bullets. In an industry that printed over a thousand books a month, however, the gems were amazingly hard to find. What made these exceptions was the fact that they were books where the writing did not take a back seat to the art. In fact, nothing took a back seat to anything.

Comic books hang on a delicate precipice where when one side is given more weight than it deserved, it ran the risk of falling from the edge. The balance in comic books, good comic books, is that of art and writing. It is a medium that takes the best aspects of each and prints it monthly. The writing in a comic book is not as easy as one may originally think. A good writer would consider the longevity of their story line and how to spread that out over so many years, as only twelve books a year are usually published, and figure out how to maintain a level of action to keep the readers interested month to month, but stretch the introduction of new characters, sub-plots, and plot developments so as not to give away too much too early. An excellent example of this was Chris Claremont's tenure as writer for the Uncanny X-Men from his creation of the "New Team" until the end of the Muir Island saga when he left the book. His stories were always complex pieces masked behind spandex wearing superheroes. Claremont would introduce a subplot with one line of dialogue to create a question in the readers mind which would not be brought up again for another five issues when another hint intrigue is introduced leaving the reader with the desire for more.

Claremont, however, is something of a rare case. All too often in today's comic books, the artist has too much control over the plot, the action, and the flow of the story. Sub-plots may be introduced, but it tends to be heavy handed since the artist, usually masterful at their chosen skill, lack the same dexterity with words and add things to their stories not because it will enrich the experience of the reader and entice them on, but because such is what is done in comic books and they feel the need to do so. A tragic example of the latter is available for sale as any book which falls under the Image logo. Inflatable baby pools tend to have more depth than do those books since the story is nothing more than an excuse to draw large chested women defying gravity whilst blowing up something large. Perhaps there are some people who find their entertainment needs satisfied by such, but few do as witnessed by the title's reader fluctuations. The readership that an Image book starts with is rarely the same one five issues later. Even in less obvious cases than image, the same writing problems persist. Frank Miller is perhaps one of the most able writers still in comics today, but tragically his Sin City books provide little more than an excuse for Frank Miller to use his almost patented contrasty black and white art and show how crazy he actually is in his letter columns. If you've read one Sin City book, you've read them all.

So what is to be done? The only thing that can. The balance in comics must be restored. The artists must learn, at the risk of their own egos that while the art may bring the reader in to a book, it is the writing that keeps them. Until that is learned, the number of worthwhile books continues to shrink. I like comic stores. I'd like to have a reason to continue going into them.