Fuck me, is it only just now coming up on a year we've been at this? (For those of you who are interested, Ninth Art will be a year old on Monday. Seems longer.)

Insofar as I can say I have a favourite unit of time (and I confess, it's not something I think about very much), it's the year. It seems to me that a year is a useful length of time for allowing one to see things in context, for allowing things time to develop, mature, change and settle.

The distance of a year feels like a good length of time to evaluate one's life - near enough that you've got some sense of why things were important, some connection to the events that you're looking at, but far enough to give a bit of detachment, an eye for the humour in what once seemed like an earth-shatteringly important and serious matter.

Yeah, I like years. They're unhurried. I'm a great believer in not rushing. Letting things happen at their own pace, in the natural flow of things. It's the Taoist in me.

Seems like something comics could use a dose of. Comics don't seem to be much for just sitting back, relaxing, and letting it all go. There's a sense of constant panic. Nothing's ever trivial. Everything that happens is fodder to be argued over at great length. Is writer X still any good? Are the fans of artist Y stupider than dirt? Will the newly announced series Z be any good (never mind the lack of anything other than marketing copy - we can make our minds up anyway)?

It's all sound and fury in comics. All that exists is what's happening now, or tomorrow. What about what happened yesterday?

'There's a constant panic in comics. Nothing's ever trivial.' Comics don't really have a huge critical vocabulary. It's growing but it's still small. The traditional excuse is that it's an infant medium. This is plainly bollocks, but that's for another time. It may be as a side effect of this that comics shy away from something that other media aren't half so afraid of: critical re-appraisal.

For example, look at Alanis Morissette. Here in the UK, JAGGED LITTLE PILL got played to death in the mid-nineties. She went from being the hot new thing when it first came out to receiving a critical panning for her follow up, SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE, in large part due to the fact that everyone was sick of having heard her on the radio three times a day for a couple of years.

So she did the smart thing: she vanished for a couple of years. And now she's back with UNDER RUG SWEPT. And everyone likes her again. And indeed, when pressed, they'll admit that as well as liking the new album, they've had another listen to SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE, and have realised that it's about as good as the other two, and that maybe they were a bit unfair last time around.

Critical re-appraisal.

When was the last time you heard someone say they'd changed their mind about a comic? When was the last time you looked at a comic that you previously disliked, and realised that actually, you were wrong about it?

This is half the problem with on-line dialogue: it's archived. If you said it on Usenet, or on a message board, or even just in e-mail, there's a good chance that someone, if not everyone, has access to a copy. And of course, everything that you say about comics when you're on-line is to be taken dreadfully seriously. It'd be embarrassing to admit that in fact you quite like RISING STARS if someone can dig out a conversation from a year ago where you spend rather more hours than might be considered entirely sane bashing out a "critique" (or more likely, diatribe) about how RISING STARS is dull, and J Michael Straczynski was an over-rated hack who should count himself lucky to be allowed to work in comics.

'When's the last someone changed their mind about a comic?' Maybe I'm exaggerating. But not much. As I said, the attitude seems to be that everything in comics is earth-shatteringly important. I mean, there are a huge number of reviewers out there, reviewing a huge number of comics. Surely the law of averages suggests that most critical comment will be saying, "It was alright. I quite liked it. Nothing stands out, but, y'know, OK." Or something similar on the negative side - not offensively bad, just kind of dull. Yet most reviews are either praising something to the skies, or damning its black soul to hell.

Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that in this industry, reviewers are generally paying for what they review out of their own pockets, but still, I think it's symptomatic of a tendency to get carried away with ourselves.

And, as I say, this doesn't lend itself well to critical re-appraisal. Which is a shame, I think. It's often very hard to really see the importance or quality of a work while it's still going on. Reviewing a single issue of a serialised comic does rather seem like reviewing a film having only seen twenty minutes worth of footage.

Beyond that, it's more or less impossible to comment usefully on say, A GAME OF YOU without seeing it in a wider context as part of SANDMAN, both with a view to the narrative, and indeed, the impact SANDMAN had on the industry as a whole. Yet people will happily do the same with a series still currently being published, without waiting to see how it looks a year, two years later. And when we can look back on it with a more useful distance, we don't usually find people willing to openly re-appraise the work, re-examine it against what they've said before and admit that they were wrong the first time around.

I think that's a bit of a shame.

Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST.

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