Do you have fond memories of the letters columns of yore? Did you recognise the names of people who wrote to every comic under the sun, and secretly think that there was something quite cool about that?

Well, if so, this has been a sad time for you, as DC has finally decided to take the plunge and abolish letters columns altogether. No more letterhacks for DC. An era passes.

In theory, I suppose I ought to be mildly upset about this. In the strange, lonely days before the Internet, I had a couple of letters published by Marvel UK's anthology STRIP, a long-forgotten stab at a mature readers anthology title which somehow found itself serialising Death's Head stories by the end of its run.

STRIP's letters column was mainly notable for a couple of issues in which the editor (Dan Abnett, I think) ran no letters at all. Instead he ran lengthy essays by himself in which he harangued the readers for the poor quality of their correspondence, and insisted that no letters would appear in the letter column until things improved. Certainly a novel approach.

Anyhow, after that I got access to the internet and completely lost interest in pen and paper.

But plenty of people will miss the letters columns and have considered it an essential part of their comics-reading experience. Vertigo got rid of its letters pages years ago, and people are still complaining about that. For that matter, Marvel seems to be squeezing them out more and more in favour of extra story page - or just giving over most of the space to house adverts and trailers for future issues.

Letters columns in superhero comics are pretty much a wasteland. In fact, of the eighteen comics I bought this week, only one has a letters page (VIOLENT MESSIAHS: LAMENTING PAIN #1). Letters pages have long been in terminal decline at Marvel and DC. DC is just stating the obvious openly. In fact, they abolished letters pages last month - nobody noticed.

DC has said that it's going to replace them with "information pages", which I take to be a way of saying that they're going to do a Bullpen Bulletins-style column. That has the obvious benefit that DC can use it across the whole line but wiill only have to pay for one off them to be written. It also means that they can get rid of the letters, which for my money were always a low spot of most letters pages.

What people seem to have missed most about the Vertigo letters columns, for example, isn't just the opportunity to see what other readers thought of recent issues. God knows I often found SANDMAN's letters column a painful experience. ("Dear Neil, I was so moved by how much you understand my cat that I have written this poem about it...") Vertigo fans seem to be at least as annoyed by the fact that they no longer get a text piece from the writer at that back of their comics, with recommendations on what to read and listen to.

Letters columns in superhero comics are pretty much a wasteland even when they do appear. Aside from the comedy value of reading letters of complaint to X-FORCE from people who didn't get the joke, there's not really much there to get excited about, and the party line editorial responses don't inspire much enthusiasm either.

The conventional argument in favour of letters columns has always been that they build community. There was some truth to this in the early days of fandom when letters pages really were one of the few ways in which readers could find out what anybody outside their social circle had thought of the comic. More to the point, the letters page was the vehicle in which people like Stan Lee could establish their personalities with the readers. This is often described as a community-building exercise, but it was just as much about promoting the Marvel brand. And it worked very well, too.

'I was so moved by your understanding of my cat that I've written a poem...' But you don't need the letters page element to build the brand in the comics. You can achieve the same effect by just running editorial material instead. The popularity of letters pages in comics is a historical accident - they're there because comics are periodical publications, and that's traditionally how periodicals have worked. This isn't really a good enough reason to keep them around.

For most people reading this, it's unlikely that your sense of belonging to some sort of comics community - if you have one - derives from letters pages. The shift in recent years has been towards online forums. These are not really a replacement for letters pages, for two obvious reasons. For one thing, they're not edited in the same way that letters pages are. For another, they allow for interaction between readers in a way that wasn't sensibly possible on a delay of a month between parts of the same conversation. They can generate an actual community in a way that letters pages could only feign.

DC appears to recognise this. The website has message boards for their entire line. It's not the prettiest site around - it's fairly obviously run off standard bulletin board software of the sort that you can see on fan sites all over the web, with a fairly minimal level of customising. But it works, and on those boards where the creators have chosen to join in, it marks a quantum improvement on the letters pages in pretty much every respect (except, I suppose, design).

Image has also introduced a message board section to its website, although oddly it seems to be one that you have to register in order to read. It's a little less developed than DC's more rational "one board per title" approach, with only five boards at present - PARADIGM, Jim Krueger, Jay Faerber, Brian Bendis, and one for all the other Image Central books. Oddly, there's nothing about the non-Image Central books at all, which seems strange given that it's Image's website. (By the way, Bendis's board seems to have more traffic than all the other boards combined.)

Message boards are the natural successors to letters pages. Marvel used to have message boards before its last website redesign, as I recall, but they don't exist any more. If you click on "Community" on the Marvel webpage, then the site will invite you to download a Doop screensaver, and enquire as to whether you'd like to book a personal appearance by Spider-Man.

There are discussion boards on Joe Quesada's personal site, (although if you aren't on broadband, you might care to skip the two slow-loading Flash menus and jump direct to the message boards themselves). But they aren't sponsored by Marvel and they aren't particularly Marvel-themed. It seems a bizarre omission from the company's own website.

Message boards are the natural successors to letters pages. They do the job better. They're usually much more interesting to read. Of course, it's a shame for people who don't have internet access - a declining but still significant number. But let's face it, it's only the letters page. I'm sure they'll get over it.

Moreover, it requires a positive effort by the reader to get to a message board, whereas reading the letters page only involves turning the page, realising that the story has finished, and keeping on reading anyway. That's a big downside - it does sacrifice the opportunity to use the letters pages to push the brand (and, if you like, the sense of community) on more casual readers.

But this is only a major problem if you pull editorial material from the comics altogether. The brand-building side of the letters page can be served just as well by other editorial material, which would have the major advantage of not being full of fan letters. The community-building side (which is really just an extension of the brand-building, from a business point of view) belongs online, where it can be done properly.

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

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