*Disclaimer: not a critic.
Is it an addiction? A fool’s paradise? FOMO? Nostalgia? OCD?
It’s been nearly 2 years since I last posted on this blog. Why am I returning?
Good question. I wish I had a good answer.
Even though nobody reads this blog, I love having it as a public-facing record of my interests and history. I still pay for the domain name and hosting, so it must still mean something to me, even if I haven’t written anything in a long time. I miss having an evolving document of what I read, what I liked, what I watched, what intrigued me. It’s not a perfect record, by any means – I search through the site and am surprised when I find I haven’t written about a particular book or film or show, as if this blog was the only way of confirming it. So coming back to it is a way of trying to maintain that.
Part of it is the love for comic book blogs as a concept – I was on the periphery of the golden age of comic book blogging back in the late 2000s, but it was a delight to be part of this global network of people who loved sharing their opinions and feelings about comic books and related geeky things that existed on the fringes of society (before the geeks took over the world and everything became a comic book franchise). I didn’t know many people who liked comic books growing up – there was one bloke at school who was a big 2000 AD fan who introduced me to the comic book shop Forbidden Planet, but that was about it. Finding my tribe online was therefore a revelation, and it was wonderful to see these discussions happening on people’s posts and in the comments (remember when commenting was the Twitter of its day?) and swim in that comic book love. Returning to blogging about comic books is a way to remember that feeling.
People still blog about comic books – my favourite regular poster is Mike Sterling on Progressive Ruin: it’s a delight to read his thoughts on running a comic book shop and his interactions with people and the world of comics. His recent collection of posts about Wolverine comics that still sell just for the covers was both fascinating and amusing as I read it and thought, ‘I’ve got that one, and that one, and, ooh, that one’.
Blogging is deliciously old school and uncool now – the enforced pivot to video meaning that YouTube and TikTok content dominates the conversations that used to be the domain of blogs depressed me a little; I read much faster than people talk, so always found video to be too slow, despite the more frantic editing that is prevalent now. Posting to a blog seems a decidedly anachronistic move, but I never did this to be cool. Also, people don’t bother with their own websites now – if you were starting up today, you would probably start a Substack newsletter (which is still essentially a blog that is sent as a ‘newsletter’, with the archives acting exactly like blog archives) with the aim of monetising your content at some point. Leaving aside the negative aspects of using a service that hosts and makes money from letting Nazis use Substack, I don’t want to monetise this stuff (and nobody would pay for it anyway). So, blogging it shall be.
One of the main reasons I stopped blogging was because I was no longer part of the conversation – when the comic blogosphere started, a lot of it was talking about current comics, which I was still buying on a weekly (or almost weekly) basis and so could be part of the discourse. It has been a long time since I purchased individual comic books, for the simple reason of price (I know, I know – I’m the problem and part of why comic books are in the doldrums despite ruling the rest of the entertainment). I can’t justify the expense of individual issues, so I can’t write about books or even read about them for fear of spoilers.
I still devour vast amounts of comic books, just in other, completely legal ways. I continue to enjoy the fantastic City of London digital comic book library, with thousands of recent Image, Dark Horse and Marvel books, which are regularly updated with current books (just the other day, I read the collected edition of One Hand and the Six Fingers). I have a subscription to DC Universe Infinite (not Ultra), purely because DC Comics do not provide digital versions to any of the libraries I access, and because the price I pay is kept at the £36 per year I first paid when I started as soon as the service was available in the UK as part of an incentive deal to get subscribers. Sure, I miss out on Vertigo comics and have to wait 6 months from being published, but I refer you to the earlier section about no longer being part of the conversation. I dip into the Marvel Unlimited app every other year, mostly for being able to access the more obscure stuff that isn’t necessarily collected.
Talking of which, another aspect of trying this again is the thought of buying comic books because I can’t access them via the apps. Marvel Unlimited is unfortunately a misnomer, because of the complete absence of MAX books (so I can’t read the latest Garth Ennis Punisher or Nick Fury books) and other books they simply don’t have. In my case, the book I want to read that isn’t on the app is the New Universe’s Psi-Force from back in the day. I brought the issues when they first came out and had a lot of fondness for the Fabian Nicieza/Ron Lim issues that made up the second half of the series, but the Marvel app has only the first nine issues of the book and nothing else. Why? I’m not sure, but it has ignited an urge to visit a comic book mart and see if I can pick up those issues in the back issue bins, preferably at a good price (25p or 50p an issue), to correct my mistake of removing them from my collection when I moved countries a few decades back. I can’t remember the last time I had that feeling, so that must be a good thing, right?
Therefore, I have once again decided to try this blogging thing again, a pattern that has been repeated on an unfortunately regular basis (e.g. here, here, here). Let’s see how long it lasts this time …