Things I am bored of hearing, number one in an occasional series: "Comics are a medium." With the emphasis on "medium", as if this was some kind of revelation or manifesto.

Well, yes, comics are indeed a medium. Well noticed there. As penetrating insights go, this one ranks right up there with, "A chair is an item of furniture". Nonetheless, this thoroughly boring observation is wheeled out with tedious regularity by people who seem to see it as evidence of the glorious possibilities of comics.

There is nothing remotely impressive or inspiring about the fact that comics are a medium. Nothing whatsoever. So comics are a medium. So what? It doesn't mean you get to automatically bracket comics along with TV, video, cinema, radio, novels and the like. 56K streaming video is still a medium. SMS text messaging is a medium. Hell, semaphore flag signals are a medium. They all convey information. You could, at a push, tell a story with any of them. It would be crap, but you could do it.

The tendency to equate the word "medium" with "boundless potential" is simple nonsense. It tells you nothing whatsoever about the storytelling potential of comics. Nor is it meant to.

There's nothing inspiring about the fact that comics are a medium. But then, that's the beautiful thing about received wisdom - if you repeat it often enough, it can become completely divorced from the original point. The comment made much more sense in its original context, which was that comics are a medium, as opposed to a genre. It's a statement of the blindingly obvious, intended to stop people using the words "comic book" as a genre description. In theory it's a rather good refutation. In practice, it hasn't made the slightest difference. People still use the term "comic book" to describe stories in entirely different media.

This seems to stick in some people's throats. Perhaps that's understandable. If you've made it your mission to change people's perceptions of comics, then it's an unwelcome reminder that there's a very long way to go.

Really, though, it's just a symptom of a wider problem of perception. And it's got nothing to do with the public's ideas of how much potential the medium has. At a push, most people would probably agree that comics have potential to tell all kinds of stories. But they believe, with some justification, that for the most part comics don't - and that's good enough for them.

What do people mean when they talk about comic book characters and stories, anyway? One popular reading is that this is yet another tragic sign of the unfortunate dominance of those damned superheroes, who are of course to blame for everything, including syphilis and inflation. After all, films like MATRIX have been described as comic book stories, and that film is sort of a superhero story. (Although the central premise is more sci-fi than superhero.)

But I don't think it's to do with genre so much as approach. When people describe a non-comics story as "comic book", what they seem to mean is that it features simplistic and corny characters and plots, it lacks depth, subtext and subtlety, it tends towards the trite and superficial, and it's aimed at a young, unsophisticated and undemanding audience. This is certainly a criticism that could be levelled at a great many superhero comics. But then, it's a criticism that could equally be levelled at plenty of war comics, or romance comics, or horror comics.

To the public, those genres are just as much an example of a "comic book" style story as a superhero comic. When they say comic book, they really do mean comic book and not superhero. They have a low opinion of the medium rather than any particular genre within it. And looking at most of the comics industry's overall output for many decades until relatively recently, it's hard to deny that they have something of a point.

The term 'comic book' is used to refer to simplistic characters and plots. You can talk all you want about potential, and about the exceptions. But potential alone doesn't alter perceptions of what comics are presently like, and comics that don't fit the description are still seen as the exceptions that prove the rule. It will be quite some time before that changes, since the public isn't reading comics in sufficient volumes to see how they've changed over the last ten to fifteen years.

The public knows full well that exceptions exist, but that's still how the public sees them. Equally, people know that not all Hollywood studio films fit the stereotype, nor does all network television. It didn't apply to all B-movies either, for that matter, and they had a similar stereotype attached to them. None of this dissuades people from using the terms as shorthand.

Admittedly, this perspective is out of date. The general trend in comics has been solidly away from traditional "comic book" simplicity for years now. Even the most mainstream superhero titles have drifted away from Silver Age values. But since most people haven't read any comics in years, it's not like they're going to know that.

In fact, these days the stereotypical "comic book" tag applies more to action films than to comics themselves - which, ironically, include some comic book adaptations. Take the BLADE films, which are well within the generally held concept of a comic book story. Despite repeated attempts, Marvel has proved unable to translate that success back to the original medium. The character stubbornly refuses to sell. Even if the movie audience has no interest in going back to the source material, why can't it be marketed successfully to the existing comics audience?

Some of the blame has to rest on the product itself. For the first movie, Marvel released a miniseries that was so uninteresting to the marketplace that it was cancelled halfway through due to poor sales. The next stab was a miniseries by Bart Sears that could charitably be described as excruciating. And the current Max series doesn't seem to be setting the world on fire.

Comics are being driven to explore other areas where they can excel. But a bigger problem is that although the BLADE movies use a concept lifted from comics, the elements that have made them successful are essentially cinematic. The real appeal of the films lies largely in elements such as the way the fight sequences are realised.

Audiences, even comics audiences, know full well that if you buy a BLADE comic, it really isn't going to be much like the film at all. It can do the same story, sure, but it can't do it in the same way. And the success of those films is all in the delivery. It's not that the plot or character are irrelevant, but they really just provide a handy prefabricated set of conflicts and plot elements around which the fun stuff can be arranged.

It's somewhat ironic that comics struggle to successfully adapt the key elements of a film that was based on a comic to start with. But the idea that just because you can label comics as a medium means they have boundless potential is nonsense. There are limits to what comics can do - most obviously, they can't really do movement or sound, only imply them, and sometimes that just isn't the same. Like all media, comics has its own areas of strength - hell, maybe poor old Blade should have been in movies all along, rather than slogging away in post-cancellation obscurity for all those years. Maybe his story is just better in film.

It's hardly a novel observation that comics are simply no longer the best medium for doing many of the stories they've been associated with in the past. CGI advances mean that very few stories are now literally unfilmable, removing comics' advantage of being able to show you things that film couldn't. Video games are better at first person power fantasies.

On the plus side, it means that even the most mainstream comics are being driven to explore other areas that comics can do better than everyone else. That's what makes the current period in the history of comics so interesting. But they're still hunting, and the assumption that something with mass appeal is going to turn up may well be an article of faith.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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