Newsarama has a feature showing why Jack Kirby is the Robert Duncan of comic books. Of course, most of us wished that Robert Duncan had the level of readership Jack Kirby has right now. But then again, the comic book readership is about as insular as the poetry one. Ask a random passerby to list five random American poets and they will probably say Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes and either Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky or someone else. Ask the same question, but with comicbook creators (creators, not characters) and they will probably say Patterson (Calvin & Hobbes) , Schultz (Peanuts), Marjorie Satrapi (Persepolis), Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Will Eisner, Art Spiegelmann and many many more names.

Comic books earn major coolness points to me, because for the most part, random passerby will name you living creators (granted, Schultz and Eisner are dead; and I know that Pinsky and Collins aren't dead, but that is not the point). Now try to get someone to name you really awesome living poets like Srikanth Reddy, Juliana Spahr or Carol Mirakove. Or even the current Poet Laureate.

Okay, we know that poetry will never have the same media penetration as comic books. Mainstream comic books, by their narrative nature, are more easily ported to other media, such as movies (obviously) or videogames. But hey! I hear Milton's Paradise Lost is being made into a movie. Expect an adaptation as faithful as the movie adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Elektra.

Eric Gelsinger! launches the KaBLOW!Bear to help us finance our KaBLOW!mobile and the KaBLOW!cave. For $19.99 a pop, help twelve starving artists achieve their dreams of world domination.

Please?

Meanwhile, Jessica Smith! starts an interesting discussion about the relative lack of presence of women in the small press world. As I wrote there, I am not sure where I stand on this issue. This also brings me back to a conversation I had over instant message with my editor. Considering the small size of poetry readership, what does small press actually mean? Is it distribution size or circulation? Lack of corporate or academic backing? The ability to nominate for the Pushcart Prize? Mode of production? (I am thinking about mimeograph/rexograph/letterpress/xerox/PDF vs. rolling presses) Or even the distributor? (DeBoer vs. SPD)

Take for example Gulf Coast, the literary magazine where I interned for a long time during my undergraduate years. GC has a relatively high profile in the poetic milieu. It's not The Paris Review, Tin House, Fence or Ploughshares, but GC has published authors with high profiles. The magazine is printed somewhere not in Texas and is distributed in bookstores by Ingram and Bernard DeBoer (I am not divulging anything confidential, it's all in the credit page).

Yet, Gulf Coast is considered (by some) small press. GC's print run runs under 2,000 copies (last time I was there). It nominates for the Pushcart Prize, which kind of sort of sees itself as a Pulitzer Prize for small presses and lit mags. And it usually pays the contributor in comp copies (2, if anything).

See the problem I am running into here?

I guess there is confusion in taxonomy here. Comic books don't really have this problem (since I started this post with Jack Kirby). You have Archie, DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, TokyoPop and everyone else. But I digress.

In the spectrum of poetry publishing, Gulf Coast is probably closer to the upper middle level magazine, where most university-backed magazines probably are. But let's leave out university mags for now. That leaves us with mem (Jill Stenger's magazine), effing magazine, Superflux, Free Lunch, 6x6, Pebble Lake Review, and that's just a sample. Going back to Jessica's point of inquiry, mem pretty much only publishes mothers, effing's last issue had 9 women out of 36 contributors, PLR half of its contributors.

I guess it really depends at where you look at. Moreover, Pebble Lake Review and Free Lunch don't really cater to experimental writers (even though the former published my first poem).

So I guess we could say I am just babbling (which I am).

Finally, what about online magazines like No Tell Motel, miPOesias, Jacket, H_NGM_N, fascicle and so on? Should we consider them small press or else? As I am writing this, Jacket shows 535,553 visitors. Depending on when that counter was installed, that gives Jacket an minimum of 19,127 visitors per issue. miPO has about the same numbers. I think that beats The Paris Review.