Let me clear something up at the beginning; this is not a review of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom. I watched the first two episodes the other day and probably when I see the third one I will write a review. I want to bring up The Newsroom because I have seen a number of reviews that have been real critical of the shows. Most of those reviews have been from people in the news industry. They have been in newsrooms, hung out with news people, have seen different personalities in the news industry. It kind of makes sense that if you want someone who would know what is real or unreal in the news industry, you would go to a newsperson to give you that information.

My father is retired military. He was in the Navy for 20 years. If you want to stay on my Dad's good side, there are a couple of TV shows you probably shouldn't mention to him. Don't say you like Gomer Pyle. Don't talk about McHale's Navy. Never, and I mean NEVER mention to him the show CPO Sharkey. When that show was on we weren't allowed to watch it for two main reasons other than the obvious. One, my Dad was a CPO in the Navy and two, Sharkey was played by Don Rickles. To my Dad having Don Rickles play a navy CPO was like having a Klan member play a black baptist preacher. Why my Dad didn't like the shows I mentioned, and there are a few others I can't remember, is the shows were comedies and made fun of the military. Yes, for those thinking, my Dad didn't like MASH either.

I brought up my Dad and the written reviews about The Newsroom to illustrate something I have written about for years. This is the time of year when reporters feel they have to be hip because of the San Diego Comic-Con and the release of many summer movies based on comic books, science fiction or fantasy. There was a long article in the New York Times a week ago and a similar article in the San Diego Union a few days ago. Both talked about geek culture, one focused on comic book movies and the other on Comic-Con, and the opinion of both was that geeks of the world, you have won. Hollywood is listening to you, San Diego embraces you, like the proverbial geek in high school geeks of the world have left high school, have become a success in the world, and now we are the big men on campus.

Reading both of the articles made me think of The Newsroom reviews, because with the few reviews I saw where the person wasn't a reporter, they liked the show and the characters. When a reporter wrote the review, the show was picked to death, with every inaccuracy pointed out and examined. Even more telling was the scorn those who hated The Newsroom had for Sorkin. It was like Sorkin was one of their own who should have known better yet pandered to the audience by playing up the interpersonal relationships rather than showing the real passion and work that it takes to put on a newscast. Reading those made me laugh because that is exactly what I have been saying about coverage of Comic-Con and geek culture for years.

Like I said, this time of year is when articles come out where reporters do a lot of comic book and Comic-Con related stories. Reading or hearing them, you can see and hear the talking points every time. There is no research in the stories. If they were working on a story about Somalia, or The Olympics, even a story on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes break up, they would research, interview friends, check on the history of the conflict and while they wouldn't be full experts by the time it was over, they would have a clear insight they could pass on to the reader or viewer.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. In the San Diego Union article about Comic-Con, the reporter wrote that sales of comics, after a slump in the beginning 2000s, have bounced back today to strong numbers. The reporter quoted someone from the comics industry for that fact. I just spent 15 minutes doing a search of sales of comic books. It took 30 seconds to type in Comic Book Sales to come up with a number of sites that tracked units sold from the distributor to the sellers. I saw figures from the mid 90s to last month sales. The other 14 minutes and 30 seconds I spent was pouring over some of the figures. While I was pretty aware of sales figures, being that I have collected comics for quite a while and have known a few comic shop owners, I have to say I was a big shocked by the figures. I knew when the Jim Lee and others were working for Marvel, sales of their books like X-Men sold close to a million units. Those are numbers that haven't been seen in comics since the Golden Age. When the royalty issue heated up and those creators formed Image, those books initially sold in the millions.

I had always used that as my benchmark when thinking about comic sales, so when DC Comics proudly announced with it's 52 launch that a number of books had sales in the 200000 units, I wasn't too impressed. When I examined the figures for a number of years I saw it could be argued that the sales jump the industry spokesperson talked about wasn't there. If anything the numbers have been stable for a number of years and if you wanted to get picky with the numbers you might be able to put an argument out that sales actually slumped with the revamp. The reason for this being the jump in sales in overall comics have been because of number 1 issues or special events issues. General comic sales have gone down. As another example, Hellblazer, a comic from DC Vertigo imprint, was selling around 60000 units in the mid to late 90s. This year, the sales of the book haven't cracked 10000. So on this one title, sales have dropped 50000, but it has to be said it is a testament to the storytelling of the book that it has lasted over 15 years.

The point I'm making by going into the woods about the stats on comic sales is if someone from the auto industry said they were making record sales this year, a reporter would check on the figures and probably would put it in context. If someone from the stock market said a Dow of 9000 was fantastic, the reporter would remind people that a few year ago the market was at 14,000. There would be a relevance given to the story to double check the facts because if the facts were inaccurate there would be a lot of people who would call them on it. That isn't done for comics.

The same thing goes for comic book movies. The New York Times article used Amazing Spider-Man and Avengers as examples that comic book movies have arrived so geeks please stop sending in the whiny reports about being misunderstood. Hollywood understands you, the article said. Only two words shoot down the theory of the article; Green Lantern. To those words let's add Jonah Hex, Ghost Rider, Punisher and a whole lot more movies could be added.

The unfortunate reality of the articles coming out this time of year is they are filler articles. We have moved past the cringe worthy time when a comic book movie review or an article on a comic convention had to have POW and BANG in it somewhere, but folks we're talking less than five years ago when that trend started to fade. All that is happening now is we are a product to sell to. Entertainment Weekly is going to have a whole issue devoted to the convention. The EXTRA TV show (a subsidiary of Warner Bros, who also own DC Comics) is going to broadcast their show from the convention, complete with a specialty built set and, for the first time, all of the Bat Mobiles in one place in a mock Bat Cave. How Bat Friggin' fantastic! VH1 is throwing a party. With all of this, many of the old time Comic-Con goers like myself always ask the same question, where are the comics? The San Diego Union article made great pains to say comics still play an important part of the convention, yet that statement proves the reporter hasn't stepped foot in any other convention other than San Diego. If they had gone to the San Diego convention for years they would have seen the shrinkage of comic book space on the dealer floor. If they had gone to other conventions, ones where the big media doesn't attend, they would be shocked at the amount of comic book space there is at smaller conventions compared to Comic-Con.

Just remember, with all the love being showered at geeks this time of year, you have to think of this attention as being like a cat. Once you scratch behind its ear, pet it a bit, feed it some food or clean out the litter box, all this attention will disappear until they want something again. It is a fickle love affair.