Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin » blogging about blogging is a sin

A handful of random observations.

Mikester — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 07:01:45 +0000

Going through a few of my bookmarked sites…there sure are a lot of dead comic blogs I still have in my bookmark file. A whole lot of ‘em kicked the bucket in the 2006/2007 range, it seems, with a few actually wrapping things up with a “goodbye” post, and a bunch with the “sorry about the lack of updates, we’ll be back soon!” messages that are pretty much the same thing as a “goodbye” post. And of course there’s one or two that just end abruptly…just a post as usual, then pffft, gone.

Well, I promise that should I ever stop posting on this site, I’ll give you a final “goodbye” message. I won’t leave you hanging. Unless, of course, I’m hit by a truck or taken out by a meteorite or something, in which case you’ll all just have to ~~make fun of~~ mourn me in the comments section of my last post. And hopefully, it won’t be one of my more embarrassing posts, like a picture of me with a shaggy beard and posing with an iPad or anything.

I’ve no intention of ending the site any time soon, just so you know. I mean, at some point I’ll wise up and stop posting on a daily basis, but nope, I’m still stupid and doing this every single day…especially since I’m so close to a seven year run of daily posts.

…

Oh, Good Lord.

A few days back, I noted that Neilalien was looking for comic book limericks…well, actually, he’s specifically looking for Dr. Strange-related limericks, and he’s already posted a few, mostly filthy dirty filthy, ones on his site. Well, that makes me feel a little silly for sending him one that 1) wasn’t even vaguely racy, and 2) about a comic book character that wasn’t Dr. Strange. Whoops.

Spent a good chunk of Saturday going through our miscellaneous indie titles boxes, containing lots of small press, short run books that only had a few issues, or from a publisher that only published that one title, or what have you. Aside from coming across the occasional comic with a price tag featuring the handwriting of an employee who hasn’t worked here since ’97, I came across a copy of a comic called Blade, that sadly I did not bring home to scan the cover, especially since the Grand Comic Database only has the second issue, and it looks like it’s up to me to complete that GCD entry on the series.
Anyway, Employee Aaron and I were kind of poking through this issue, being amazed and amused at just how violent it is, and at how 90% of the book is dialogue-sparse, but the last page is nearly all word-balloons, a giant exposition dump.

Oh, and it’s all drawn by Tony Harris, who’s definitely come a long way.

This is neat: Kevin Church wrote up a Guide to The Rack, with links to key installments of the strip. He was also nice enough to specify my involvement in the development of the comic’s most horrifying character.

Hearing some comments from the customers about there being too many Avengers titles. Not angry or upset or anything…just a sort of…bemusement and a feeling of non-surprise that this is what Marvel is doing with the relaunch. Going to have to keep a close eye on how sales go on them.

Kind of getting flooded with all the $1 sampler books DC, Marvel and Image are churning out. And some odd things are getting reprinted: sure, we can always use more Chew #1s, but not terribly sure we needed that reprint of the Free Comic Book Day Spider-Man. Ah, well, we can always give ‘em away next FCBD. Or build a fort out of them.

Lots of requests lately for just plain ol’ logo t-shirts, particularly for Superman and Green Lantern, who, I understand, ain’t got nothing on me. Okay, I should probably edit that out, but I’m not going to.

Had a customer ask about a 3-D Plastic Man comic that he remembered from his childhood in the 1950s. Anyone know of such a thing? I did some quick searches here an’ there in my usual online funnybook resource haunts, and came up with nada. If you have any info, please let me know, internet pals!

Post #3000.

Mikester — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:01:27 +0000

Well, post #3000 kind of sneaked up on me, there…I’d been tied up with work stuff and writing projects and tweaking the new version of the site and so on, and didn’t notice it was so close. Even though I had plans for #3000, by the time I was ready to finally start putting them into action, well, there it was. And since comics like to commemorate big “anniversary” type events with issue numbers that end in zeroes, I wanted to do something at least a little special today.

It sort of weirds me out a bit that I’ve been at this as long as I have. I know other people have done it for longer, and there are plenty of folks out there who have been more prolific in their posting. But for me, personally, it surprises me a bit that I’ve stuck to it for 6 1/4 years, for 3000 posts.

But I’m glad I have. Despite the occasional low moments, the occasional frustrations with the industry and its level of discourse, the occasional feeling of redundancy given the large number of comic blogs out there and what makes me think I’m so special…

…the fact that you folks are out there, reading my site, and hopefully enjoying my particular perspective on comics is something that I find quite heartening. I originally started this site just to amuse myself, pal Dorian, and a few other friends, of both the online and in-real-life sort. And as I’ve mentioned several times before, that I managed to garner an audience beyond that small group of people that have already learned to somewhat tolerate me is a constant surprise.

So I wanted to use today’s post to thank all of you for reading my site. For continually coming back, whether it’s every day or once a week or once a month, whether you just glance at my site once in a while through your feed reader, or whether you just Google image-search my site for pics to hotlink for your Myspace pages. Well, okay, maybe I don’t want to thank those last people, but the rest of you…thank you for reading, and for your comments, emails, and other forms of encouragement for my behavior. And, especially, thank you for putting up with the hopefully-infrequent site glitches, my struggles with commenting systems and WordPress hoohar, and the periodic rants and losses of temper. I always want to provide smooth sailing, but thanks for not abandoning ship when I hit rough waters. (NOTE: I have never actually been on a boat.)

Thanks for sticking around, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

most images from the Grand Comics Database, a fine resource for your comic-booking needs

Permalinks, Alpha Flight, Rudy, insurance, and ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Mikester — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:01:49 +0000

So Neilalien had a short essay regarding Blogger’s dropping of FTP publishing, which, as you may recall, instigated my own switchover to the WordPress blogging platform. After reading what he had to say, I emailed Mr. Alien and talked over this situation, particularly in regards to “linkrot” (i.e. the breaking of links to my old Blogger permalinks, lost when I moved to WordPress). I was especially concerned since, not only did I break any incoming links from other sites, I had a habit of linking to past posts, so plenty of internal links were broken.

However, Neil suggested a solution which I’ve since implemented…republishing stripped down versions of my old archive pages through Blogger, containing all the old permalinks, which themselves include links back to the current version of my site. (I’ve also – hopefully – set those pages to not be indexed by search engines, so I shouldn’t have duplicate results on everything.) It’s not the most elegant solution in the world, but it’s better than people getting 404 errors all over the place. And I’m no longer breaking links in other people’s sites, which really did bother me.

From what I gather, if I’d been using Blogger’s “post-per-page” format instead of the “archive.html#4358435080490″-style permalinks, I wouldn’t be having this problem, as those appear to translate over a little easier. Or, at least, I’d be having different, more easily solvable problems. Unless there’s a solution I missed, which I’m sure I’ll hear about in the comments if I did.

Anyway, short version…old permalinks should go to something other than a 404 page now. Sorry for the inconvenience, and sorry for not being very considerate of you folks who suddenly found old links to my site suddenly not working. And now, I can put off trying to manually fix all my internal links, which would have probably driven me crazy when I hit this post.

A CAVEAT: at some point, I had an issue with some new update of Blogger or ‘nother, and my archive page URLs changed format. If you see links in earlier pages of mine to even older posts in this format:

“http://progressiveruin.com/archives/2004_04_25_archive.html#108291646897164207″

…you can remove the “archives/” directory, making the link this:

“http://progressiveruin.com/2004_04_25_archive.html#108291646897164207″

…which will work. I keep meaning to fix those, but, geez, who has the time?

Anyway, that’s a whole lot of “blogging about blogging,” for which I apologize. Thanks for your indulgence while I work out the kinks that still exist in my redesign.

• • •
Just so I have some comic book content today:

Action Comics #1 sells for one million smackers. I wondered when this was going to happen. I think, a long time ago, back in my BBS days, I predicted in a comics forum that we’d see this happen by the year 2000. Hey, I was close.
Friend of the site Tom Mason writes a bit about William Overgard, the cartoonist what brought us Rudy, and you know how much I like Rudy.
Andrew has another Nobody’s Favorite, and she was borne of Bill Mantlo’s Alpha Flight. (By the way, for a while there, Alpha Flight, under both Byrne and Mantlo, was one of the just straight-up creepiest superhero comics ever. And I really do mean that in a good way.)
I’ve unfortunately not been pointing out Dave’s recent series of posts discusssing the “Interplanetary Insurance” series from 1950s DC Comics. Yes, that would be tales of insurance sales and claims. With robots and aliens. In SPAAAAAAACE. This is both completely insane and completely awesome. Go, read.

If only life were like that.

Mikester — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:01:58 +0000

from World’s Finest #183 (March 1969) by Leo Dorfman, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito

Hey, I didn’t even realize when I pulled this comic aside that its cover date is the very month and year of my birth! (Its actual release date was likely a month or two previous, I think.) Huh, neat. To think my birth coincided with the raising of the Superman and Batman flags at the United Nations…where they fly even today.

Anyway, you guys had some comments on the redesign from yesterday, so let me respond to a couple:

Just Some Guy sez:

“Oh god! Searing pain in my retinas! The glare… too bright!”

Yeah, it is very…white, isn’t it? I’d been dead set on duplicating the exact look of the old site, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to upgrade…I kept fiddling around with WordPress templates and getting frustrated and giving up. But I think this layout is a lot more open, and a lot less, I don’t know, 2003. I think I can live with it.

Plus, I finally changed the banner. Having some old friends staring back at me from across the top of my site helps ease the transition.

Walaka wonders

“Um, isn’t the apostrophe in your title backwards/upside down? What’s up with that?”

What, indeed? That’s just how the apostrophe is in this particular font used by this theme (Hanami, if you were wondering and if you hadn’t yet peeked at the link at the very bottom of the page). To tell the truth, it kind of bothered me at first, but just a little, and I kind of like it now. Just a little bit of weirdness in an otherwise stately design.

Plus, when I looked at the site on my work computer, it just had the standard straight-line computer apostrophe, so I guess whatever font that is isn’t installed in the shop’s computer. I just used “computer” three times in that sentence.

Pal Andres asks, in regards to my old comments:

“If I read the Blogger update correctly your old site will still be accessible, right?”

Well, it could be, if I go through the trouble of setting it up, but then I’d have two copies of my site on the internet and that could be confusing and screw up Googlers and Bingers and such. I mean, I could adjust settings so that Google wouldn’t index the other site or whatever, but one of the reasons I made the transition over to WordPress in the first place is to kind of keep things simple and in one place. Google’s new set-up would have required fiddling with subdomains and redirects to where Google would be hosting my actual posts, while all the media would still be served up by my hoster, and feh on that.

Employee Aaron declares

“The whiteness of your site will burn my retinas every morning from now on! Soon we will have progressive ruin the social networking site so we can compare Swampthing embroidered doilies!”

You’re fired.

C. Elam gives me more gray hair by suggesting

“I am sure you will be working on fixing links on a prodigious number of your entries, because that is the sort of thing that bothers folks like us. Good luck getting things back to ‘normal.’”

I do plan on fixing some of the internal links to other posts, but it’ll be a slow process since I’m gettin’ near to 3000 entries on this site, and I’d like to be able to sleep sometime. I’ll probably focus on the most recent year’s worth of posts, and work backwards from there.

Former employee Ray (and, in fact, the guy I replaced here at the shop!) pleads

“But you have to get the 1969 thing going. I MUST KNOW what you have done since 1969.”

I think instead of the rotating banner I used to have, that would display a new “since 1969″ phrase every time you reloaded the site, I may instead be changing the phrase manually in my banner up there. Not quite as dynamic, I realize, but not everything can make the transition, I’m afraid!

I don’t have the rotating “what people are saying about PROGRESSIVE RUIN” thingie anymore, either, but I do plan on throwing those quotes onto my mostly-empty “About” page. Yes, even the one Dirk wrote about me six years ago about being “one of the better new comic bloggers to emerge so far this year.” I’m hanging onto that quote for dear life.

Ed queries

“Any plans to expand the blogroll to something approaching its former glory?”

Oh, yes, absolutely. But it’ll be a separate page, accessible via a button next to “HOME” and “ABOUT” up there by the banner. Assuming I can do that, that is. In fact, I would have done that today, except I spent all my blogging time doing that swank new banner image. (Who’s not a Photoshop expert? THIS GUY.)

One of the things that bothered me most about the other site is the sheer number of links in the sidebar. It looks cluttered and cramped, but I didn’t want to drop a bunch of links, either. By putting the links on a separate page, that’ll likely encourage me to add lots more of them, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. The links I do have in the sidebar were just kind of put up there to have a blogroll, and are mostly my closest internet pals, the folks with whom I do Fake AP Stylebook, and the mighty Neilalien, the first and most powerful of all comic webloggers.

Anyway, I hope that answered some of your questions about the site. It’s still a work in progress, and again, thank you for your patience and your readership. (And a reminder: you’ll probably need to resubscribe to the syndication feed for your RSS readers…just flip that little chromium switch there at the top of the page.)

In other news:

Employee Aaron’s girlfriend Mel had a drawing of hers printed in Tank Girl: Skidmarks #3, out this week in a funnybook store near you. Well, okay, we sold out already, but it’s available for reorder and I’ve got more coming! Here’s a little snippet of it:

Pick up the issue and check out the whole pic! Oh, and read the rest of the comic, too. After you pay for it. With money.

You can also visit her Deviantart site and take a gander at her pictures…which, um, may include that same Tank Girl drawing, BUT GO TO SHOP AND PAY MONEY FOR COMIC. Thank you.
This gentleman is putting together a list of the “100 Best Comic Book Covers” from 1980 to present, and I’m sure he’s going to get a lot of “um, you forgot” and “wow, really?” responses that these lists always get, but hey, a lot of those are nice images. So anyway, go check it out. Tell him he forgot this cover.

Well, here we go.

Mikester — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:01:39 +0000

I’m all WordPressed up here now, as some of you may have noticed. Some problems immediately come to mind, such as all my old permalinks are now busted, so even my link back to a previous post in yesterday’s entry doesn’t work. Ah, well. And you may need to resubscribe to the RSS feed, which you can do by clicking that “syndicate” button up there in the upper right hand corner.

Still haven’t looked into reinstalling the old comments system, since I don’t want to lose all those, but maybe there just comes a point where you have to let things go, man, and start afresh. But I don’t want to lose some of the great comments from the last couple of days, for sure, so I’ll probably get around to reposting those on their related entries.

A major cosmetic change is that the banner submission thing I used to do here is now on hiatus. I do need to change that default image, but I don’t expect I’ll be rotating it on a weekly basis any more. I still have my sidebar icon pics, though! The archive is still using the old template, but eventually I’ll fix that. (And maybe someday I’ll finally get that archive of old banners up.)

Links: I still have the list o’links from the old site, but I’m not going to overload the main page with them. I put a few in the sidebar, just to see how it looks, but I think I’m going to create a separate page for the rest of the links.

So anyway, I’m not done fiddling with the page just yet, so please excuse our dust while we’re under construction.

I always wanted to use one of those graphics.

But seriously, thank you for your patience while I try to get settled, here. We’ll be back to talkin’ about comics and pictures of Sluggo in no time.

Blogging about WordPress is a sin.

Mikester — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:01:00 +0000

Gang, I’m finally in the process of making that jump to WordPress from Blogger, due to Blogger’s impending removal of certain publishing tools that I use to produce this award-winning content day in and day out. (NOTE: No awards have actually been won by this site.)

As such, I spent most of my Tuesday evening transferring posts from one spot to another, messing around with templates, and not coming up with a post for today. So I apologize, and hopefully soon I can finish up and get at least a barebones WordPress version of my site going. Not sure if my rotating “since 1969″/”what people are saying about PR” thingies will make the transition, but we’ll see.

Another problem is the comments, which may not make the transfer and makes all that hoohar about the changing comments system sort of moot. I think there’s a WordPress install for the comments system I’m using, but I’ll look into it this evening. (I’m writing this at past midnight Wednesday morning, by the way…say, don’t I have to break down a new comics order in a few hours?)

One question I want to ask you folks…the WordPress theme I plan on using (essentially the same one pal Dorian is using, but with one sidebar) has the option of an 800 pixel-wide display, or a 1024 pixel-wide one. I’m leaning towards 1024, but I want to hear what you folks think, so please let me know.

Thanks in advance for your patience over the next couple of days as I try to make this transition.

A handful of links:

It’s episode 7 of The Variants! It’s like your comic shop, but funnier!
War Rocket Ajax interviews the boys from El Gorgo! Stick around through the end of the interview to hear an awful, awful question I submitted to be asked of these poor guys.
Over at Comics Alliance, Chris Sims has a new installment of Chris Vs. Previews, which is kind of like my End of Civilization posts, except that son-of-a-bitch gets paid for it. Plus, he totally borrowed a joke from my Previews write-up for his article, which he asked if he could do, and I of course said yes, because why? Because Chris and I are BROTHERS IN COMICS, that’s why.

In which Mike has had some minor technical issues.

Mikester — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 07:01:00 +0000

I’ve had bit of a computer problem here at Progressive Ruin Headquarters, which thankfully is not serious (i.e. nothing expensive needed replacement, and no irreplaceable data was lost), but the end result is that I’ve spent quite a while reinstalling system software and programs, and as my computer is held together pretty much by hope and prayers, I’ve been doing some juggling to make sure everything is working together the same way it was before. So, if some of you were wondering why “Sluggo Saturday” was so late yesterday…that’s why. (I ended up posting that one from work.)

Ultimately, “Operation: Get Mike’s Computotron Running Again” hasn’t left me with any time to put together the “Other Things Arisia Was Saying” follow-up post. I’ll try to get it up Monday, so if you had any of your own entries you wanted to send in, you’ve got a day’s extension.

So I’m gonna call a “time-out” for this site today, while I continue to get my computer back in fightin’ shape. Thanks for reading, and I’ll talk to you tomorrrow.

Blogging about other people’s blogging, as well as my own, is a sin.

Mikester — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:01:00 +0000

Pal Tom is retiring his weblog, which is a darned shame, but I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing him the best. Plus, he’s on the Twitter, so it’s not like we’ll never hear from the guy.

Tom was one of the four founding members of what I liked to call the Associated Comics and Pop Culture Webloggers of Ventura County, CA, and Outlying Environs (ACAPCWOVCCAOE for short, natch), along with pal Dorian, pal Ian, and myself. I’ve added a few folks to the collective, some of whom I realize haven’t updated in a while. But Tom, Dor, Ian and I were the charter members of this alleged organization, and it is a little sad to see one of the Inner Circle decide to retire.

So good luck, Tom! Enjoy your life free of feeding the blog, what with your “going outside” and “having friends” and “enjoying life” and all that jazz. Why, you wouldn’t catch me doing any of that.

In other news:

You may have noticed that I finally used tags on one of my posts. You can now click “sluggo saturday” at the end of a Sluggo Saturday post and get a faceful of Sluggo. No need to thank me.

As pal Dorian told me regarding this, “welcome to 2005,” so yeah, I’m a tad behind the curve when it comes to this sort of thing. I just haven’t been looking forward to going back and tagging all 3,000 posts, and I’d been putting it off until I upgraded to a more robust blogging platform. But, who knows when I’ll do that, so there you go. Enjoy some tagging.
Some follow up to a couple of questions I was asked via my comments sections, but never got around to answering:
Flossin wondered

“Also: Mike, are you an Andy Kaufman fan? I saw some Amazon ads for ‘My Breakfast with Blassie’ here and was just wondering.”

Yes, I am quite the Kaufman fan. I always appreciated that he either 1) kept audiences wondering what was a put-on and what wasn’t, and 2) just outright aggressively tested their patience. I realize that, like most comedy, it’s not for everybody, but I thought he was brilliant.

Roel asks

“…Isn’t 500 considered a bigger event than 600? Why would they ignore 500 but return to the old numbering for 600? That seems backwards…”

I’m not entirely sure…issue 500 would have been near the middle of the 1998 Cap series, so the “new #1″ sales bump would have been over, and I doubt they knew that the series was going to end at #50 by that point, so that wouldn’t have been a consideration. Maybe they just plain didn’t feel like it, that the series was doing well enough without having to restore the original numbering to generate an Extra-Sized Issue.

The again, they did just do that on Thor after only about 12 issues, a series that’s still selling fairly well, so who knows. Just another attempt at grabbing the consumer in a rocky marketplace during economic turmoil…you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.