I want to tell you about a world that is very much like ours, except for one key difference: movies.

In this world, you can only buy movies in the movie shop. Most large cities have a movie shop, though smaller cities often don’t and towns are right out. Live in a village? It’s off to the big city to get your stories, kiddo.

And no, you can’t buy movies online either. OK, you can, but there’s only like three websites that sell them and they don’t carry a lot of stuff and they look really sketchy. You wouldn’t trust them with your credit card.

Anyway, back to the movie shop. In the movie shop there are all sorts of movie-related products for you to browse: toys and games, clothing, promotional posters and soundtracks… and even a few DVDs containing actual movies. These discs themselves occupy at most a third of such stores.

Also found in the movie shop are movie geeks. These social outcasts love nothing more than to talk about their favourite movies with each other, the weary employees, and if you’re particularly unlucky, other customers.

You see, gentle reader, on this world watching films is considered a terribly expensive and anti-social past-time. Most movie-watchers are actually embarrassed to talk about their hobby outside of the safety of their local shop or an internet community. Sometimes a radio drama or a play will be made based on a movie’s plot or characters (though not often both), and it might even do quite well, but mass cultural acceptance of the medium is forever fleeting.

Does this world seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me, nor will it to anyone else who reads comics. Yes, that’s the Shamylan-esque reveal that nobody saw coming – Bruce Willis I was in the present talking about comic books the whole time!

Comic books are, after all, just a story-telling medium like movies. They don’t just tell stories about people who wear capes and fight crime, just as not all movies are about spies who wear dinner suits, and not all books are detective stories wherein the butler did it. Very often these days the butler didn’t even do it!

Then again, the really good ones are about people who can fly, the rest is just pretentious nonsense about Nazi mice and whatnot. And the butler generally did it.