Why comics are dying, part N in a series (collect them all)

A short letter to Neil Gaiman's blog said this:

In case you are interested in yet another article about the popularity of graphic novels, there was an article in Sunday's South Florida Sun-Sentinel titled, "Comics animate reading skills in school library". The article states, among other things, that at the Boynton Beach High School library, graphic novels "account for 1 percent of the library's collection but 50 percent of the books students check out."

Sincerely,
Alice, a librarian in Chicago

How to wring bleakness from a mention this positive? Simple:

People read comics when they don't have to pay for them. Comics are too friggin' expensive.

Don't need to be a weatherman

One of the shows that convinced me that I wanted to start watching live-action TV again (after a self-imposed moritorium which lasted most of the 1990s) was 24, the reasonably clever, often very stylish, and frequently exciting action-adventure-movie-as-TV series which is now in its third season.

A problem facing modern television is that an annual season is generally fewer than 23 episodes, which means that more than half the year, a show is in reruns. (That's for broadcast seasons. Cable shows are even worse.) This is bad for the viewers of most shows, because it means that new episodes are concentrated at the start of the season (for the Sept/Oct launch) and for sweeps in November, February, and May. In December, January, March, and April, you get a lot of reruns interspersed with the new episodes. Fox has decided that because of its serial nature, 24 doesn't get reruns, which means it just plain disappears from the air for weeks at a time.

This time, the break is the entire month of March. (Well, not quite--there will be a new episode on March 30, five weeks after the last new episode.)

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Fox is happy to see 24 disappear. I won't mourn it--this season is good, and it would be better for it to end before Jack sees a leprechaun. But it's just so, so, Fox to let it to whimper to an end with a month-long gap in the middle for no reason other than it's not sweeps month.