In my experience, the artier side of comics (and, uh, no offense meant here, because I know you lean more that way than I do) has a tendency to be rather humorless about its own personal standards. It's much like arthouse cinema - the diehard devotees go into paroxysms of ecstasy over what they view as 'art', and rage and howl at what they don't - and their standards are often fiendishly high. Mainstream comics fans, on the other hand, have been handed some pretty poor stuff these days, what with mishandled characters, generic artwork, sadly predictable plotlines, etc. Therefore, they tend to be a little less scathingly particular when it comes to quality stuff - following the cinematic metaphor, it's like when 'Dark Knight' and 'Iron Man' came out in theaters within a few months of each other and everyone went 'whoa, nelly!', because they'd gotten so used to superhero films that were half-hearted affairs that having two terrific examples of the genre one after the other was like a breath of fresh air. They turned out for the so-so ones anyway, but they TEEMED towards DK and IM. The artsy types still largely turned up their noses at them - or liked them, and felt REALLY guilty for it, and wrote five-page articles trying to explain away just WHY they liked them - but we nerds were happy, because we knew what we liked, and we'd seen it. We're more the pragmatic types. We may not know art, but we know what we like - and we like your stuff. It's good.