The numbers don’t lie: More people are reading Image comics every single week, and those numbers are going to increase, whether they get them from your stores or from someplace else, because no offense to everyone who made the last 20 years so vital and creative, but right now, we’re blasting headlong into the future and creating some of the best comics in history.

See – in the past, when everyone claimed the sky was falling, it was because we were losing readers in droves – and worse, we were losing stores – because our numbers had been inflated by speculation.

But the reason the sky isn’t falling now – the reason we’re actually skyrocketing – is because there are readers – real readers, the kind of customers we all want – in abundance.

It’s our job – yours, mine, and the creators we publish – to capture their attention and give them the kind of experience they’ll come back for again and again.

That’s Image’s Eric Stephenson, from his keynote address at the C2E2 Retailer’s Summit yesterday (as posted in full at iFanboy). The “we” that’s skyrocketing is, presumably, Image Comics and not the industry as a whole, but it’s worth pointing out that according to figures released the direct market is actually growing annually. Are comics better off now that during the boom years of the 1990s, in terms of the business as well as the quality of the comics themselves…?

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