I'm writing this while on holiday. Nothing particularly exotic: my girlfriend and I are spending a week on the Yorkshire coast, in the north of England.

A few miles inland are the Yorkshire Moors, probably most familiar to people as the setting for the first few scenes of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. Just up the coast is the old fishing port of Whitby, itself best known to most people as the town where Dracula came ashore in Bram Stoker's novel.

It's cold, wet, often barren and - to quote our most overused phrase of the week - "A bit Godforsaken",

But Yorkshire's also very beautiful if, like me, you find beauty in the power and majesty of nature - and I don't mean in a hippy-mother-earth-crap kind of way. I mean in the way that the landscape suddenly drops away into deep glacial valleys; the way inexplicably enormous rocks lie at the foot of immense waterfalls, spitting icy water at you; the way chalk cliffs rise four hundred feet above the coastline, once a cave-riddled haven for smugglers thanks to thousands of years of erosion.

Yorkshire people often refer to their landscape as "God's country". It really is a beautiful place.

But exotic? Even the most ardent lover of untamed nature would be hard pushed to describe the place in such a manner. Yorkshire is not a place that features heavily in the itinerary of pop stars.

Speaking of pop culture - and bear with me, the link is less tenuous than you might think - holidays are one of the few times I actually get time to absorb the stuff. I'm shockingly, though not wilfully, ignorant of most pop culture; I haven't been to the cinema in months, I don't have the faintest clue what's at the top of the music charts, and with the end of 24 there are currently no TV programmes that I watch regularly. I just don't have the time, these days.

'Comics are not a passive medium. You can't sit back and let a comic run.' So getting away from work into a week's forced exile gives me the time to actually pay attention to this stuff. I can now state with authority that TV is mostly as dull as it was six months ago, John Peel is still the best DJ on radio (and Peel's good, but by God he's old; it's a sad day when a man who will be picking up his bus pass in a few years is the most vital force for non-mainstream music in the country), and Liberty X's new single is nowhere near as catchy as their debut.

Despite how all that sounds, this micro-absorption of pop has actually been very useful, not least because it's helped me galvanise a thought I've been mulling over for a while now on the subject of comics, pop culture and (told you) creators as pop stars.

They're not good thoughts, I'm afraid. And they can be summed up in just a few words:

We are not performing artists.

Comics, like books, are not a passive medium (it might be stretching to call them "active", but there you go). You can't just sit back and let a comic run.

Sound and vision-based media - music, TV, movies, theatre to an extent - are entirely passive. The content is broadcast, and all you have to do is receive it. A "push" medium, if you like - one which requires, at the most basic level, absolutely no effort on your part. You can listen to music while driving, you can watch TV while cooking dinner, and so on.

Broadcast media have a distinct, advantageous method of advertising themselves - through their own medium. To advertise a TV programme, you use the TV. To advertise a piece of music, you use the radio, or TV again. To advertise a movie, you use the movies (or TV again - ubiquitous, no?). If you broaden "advertise" to include reviews and showcasing - which I don't think is pushing it much - you have a means of introducing people to new entertainment which requires no effort on the consumer's part, and can be broadcast in short bursts - ideal for the modern, time-intensive age.

Which brings me to what I realised on holiday. First, it was listening to John Peel as we drove back down the coast road from a Mexican restaurant. The next evening, it was watching NEWSNIGHT REVIEW on television.

'We don't do gigs. We rarely go on tour. We are not performing artists.' John Peel's "schtick" is, and has been for decades, that he plays almost exclusively new and eclectic music. For two hours, three nights a week (I could swear he used to be on every night, but that may just be my memory playing tricks), you're pretty much guaranteed a minimum of twenty brand-new records.

And you can bet they'll be from an absurdly wide variety of genres; I've certainly heard him follow Tindersticks with Napalm Death before now, and such transitions aren't unusual. Peel has said in past interviews that he listens to around four hours of brand new music every single day. You have to respect anyone who loves his job that much.

In addition to the music, you'll hear upcoming tour dates, plus the odd message from a band about how great last night's gig was or where the tour bus is taking them right now.

So the thought occurred to me - "If only we had something like this for comics". But thinking on it further, I realised how difficult that would be. What possible method could you employ to introduce twenty new comics in just a couple of hours, and in a way that requires no effort beyond being receptive on the part of the consumer?

Well, you can't. We don't do gigs - we rarely go on tour. We are not performing artists.

As for NEWSNIGHT REVIEW... It was the final nail in this train of thought's coffin, really.

There have been TV shows before - mostly art review programmes - that have focused on comics, at least in one-off reports or special broadcasts. And, as interesting as some of them have been to me, I wouldn't dream of showing them to someone who has no existing interest in the medium. I'd curl up on the couch and die of embarrassment.

How do you 'broadcast' a comic? Add some music, maybe read out the dialogue? Add sound effects, move the camera along the page one panel at a time? These are all methods of 'showing' comics I've seen used on TV, and they just don't work - they trivialise the medium, saying, "This is an incomplete piece of work."

'Our own medium is the only one suited to advertising our work.' But what's the alternative? Well, how about the author reading some of it out?

One of the works on show in NEWSNIGHT REVIEW was MIDDLESEX, the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES). Other content in the show consisted of Ken Loach's new film, SWEET SIXTEEN, impressionist Rory Bremner's new West End stage show, and the new horror movie MY LITTLE EYE. These latter were easily sampled - a video clip of the movie/performance, using its own medium, is sufficient for any of us to 'get' what the piece is like.

The 'clip' of MIDDLESEX, on the other hand, was excruciating. A semi-opaque close-up of the pages in the book - the camera actually scrolling along the printed text - while the equally semi-opaque Eugenides reading out a passage. And that was pretty much it. Now, I'm sure Eugenides is a great guy - and MIDDLESEX may be a great book - but he's certainly not comfortable in front of a camera, reading out his own words. Books aren't written for that purpose; they're a minds-eye experience, where the only voice in the reader's head is one that sounds entirely natural and right - their own.

Of the four works reviewed on that show, it was this clip of Eugenides which failed, and failed utterly, to transmit any impression of what MIDDLESEX might actually be like to read.

We are not performance artists. Our own medium - or to a lesser extent straight prose - is the only one adequately suited to reviewing and advertising our work.

This is why the idea of comics 'pop stars' doesn't, and never will, work. Sure, it's possible to be a celebrity insofar as your notoriety, infamy or popularity goes. But celebrity is a far cry from stardom. Like novelists, we don't have torrid tales of larging it on stage to tell; or reports of a premiere to enthuse over; or ten-second clips which can be broadcast on TV to advertise our work.

Comics may not 'fit' an analogy of any other medium ideally, and that's the way it should be; we're unique, and it's our strength. But we're definitely closer to books than music, or movies.

Perhaps it's time we embraced that.

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

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