You’re right, of course, but this is hardly unique to comic books.

Politics, sports, business, religion, you name it — on every subject except possibly the weather, people tend to interpret new information so that it matches their personal biases.

No, it ain’t pretty.

But I have to laugh when a fat 48-year-old guy in a Batman T-shirt and cargo shorts, who drew THE INCREDIBLE HULK or AQUAMAN or whatever 15 years ago, and now maybe writes a “column” on funnybooks for the Interwub with an audience of 243, complains about “the fans.”

Oh, those pesky fans with their opinions! Who asked them! They don’t have the sources I do! Why, just last year, I had lunch with the guy who colors one of the X-MEN books!

Industry whiners: The fans paid for your Batman T-shirt. You don’t have to agree with them — hell, you don’t have to read their comments at all, if you don’t want — but they’re entitled to their opinions on funnybooks as much as you are.

Indeed … maybe it’s time to disable the “comments” feature. But then, they wouldn’t hear any praise, either …

Of course, this is just cognitive bias, and everyone’s prone to it; but you do get some very blatant examples from comics fans (of all stripes). And it makes for some debates which are simultaneously heated yet extraordinarily boring.

Whiny fanboys calling professionals whiners is taking on a Python-esque bizarreness.

Indeed. It’s always entertaining to watch those-who-would-be-insiders get all lathered up when the proles dare to criticize anything.

Mmm. Not sure I agree with you on that one.

No, I don’t think the rich men who run Time Warner are reading Comicon and trying to figure out how Lawson feels about DC Comics this week. (Nor do they take my calls or registered letters, the ungrateful bastards.)

But customers’ views can have relevance, because in the end, customers vote with their feet. They walk away. And looking at the noticeable sales sag for DC’s monthly comics — across the board — I’d say a lot of us walked away.

The average monthly sale for a DC Universe title — the superhero stuff, like Superman, Batman and the Flash — is about 33,000 these days. It wasn’t that long ago that a comic selling only 33,000 copies at one of the Big Two publishers was considered a stinker.

No relevance?

We have ways and ways of communicating our displeasure.

They certainly don’t have any say in whether or not Didio keeps his job. Time Warner does, and they’ve been happy enough with his job performance to renew his contract at the end of this year.

But your point about industry whiners is rather off: they whine when they’re not at risk of getting blacklisted. If you’re talking about Steven Grant, he’s not afraid of speaking his mind, and he’s not in danger of not being hired right now.

Hey, I like to think I whine as much as the next fanboy. Or more! But I’ve never kidded myself that I was changing the industry. I was just enjoying the feel of a fine whine. I’d love to see Dan DiDio replaced at DC — I’d love to start buying some DC titles again — but at the end of the day, this is just a hobby, and I do have other things to spend my time and money on.

Now, the industry whiners — these are either people desperate to keep Dan DiDio and Joe Quesada happy with them (”Replace YOU?! Hell, no, boss, I’d never want to replace you! You’re a genius and we all LOVE you!”) or they’re just washed-up has-beens who wrote CAPTAIN DARK KNIGHT 15 years ago and are looking for a shot to get back into the full-time funnybook business. Talk about folks whose whining has an agenda behind it! I’d trust the customers any day before I’d trust the hired help.

And yes, fans are being very, very silly in predicting that Didio would be fired. It shows how little fans know about how the industry works and how corporations are run.

DC isn’t completely dependent on the sales of their comics - the merchandising and licensing of rights to other medium makes them far more money than the comics themselves do. Industry “whiners” know this. Fans think they - the vaunted fans - can bring about change when that’s not true. That’s Magical Thinking.

Because if fans did have that much influence, Joe Quesada would have been fired years ago.

Ah! OK.

And what magical powers do industry whiners have?

Because if we fans are being silly by predicting the firing of Dan DiDio every 20 minutes — and we are — the industry whiners who complain about all this dissatisfaction, while DC’s monthly sales slip 20 percent, don’t look particularly brilliant themselves.

He’s saying that whining fans start having magical thinking like George W. Bush.

The only thing less interesting than hearing us fans complain about comics on the Web is hearing other people complain about us complaining about comics on the Web. This week seems to be offering a bumper crop of complaint complainers — call them industry whiners — who are baffled by the low rumble of grumbling.