The end of a rampage; blogging about blogging is a sin; hey, it’s the Infinite Crisis, for you and for me; I type too much.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the closure of Fanboy Rampage, the comics weblog that read terrible, terrible comic message boards so you didn’t have to. I’ve said before that the Rampage was one of the inspirations for me to finally get my own weblog going…though it’s hard to believe Graeme’s site had only been around for a couple months at that point. It already seemed like a vital part of the comicsweblogosphere, even at that early stage.
So, arrivederci, Graeme, and good luck to you.
So, who does that leave for the long-running webloggers? We have Comic Treadmill, which just celebrated its two-year anniversary; Laura “Tegan” Gjovagg, Aquaman’s #1 proponent for nearly three years; Johnny Bacardi, serving ’em up for about three years; and of course, the nigh-invincible Neilalien, who showed everyone else how to do it. Plus, I’m just about at the two year mark myself. And I’m sure I’m missing somebody, but that’s what the comments section is for.
There are also new comic webloggers popping up all the time, so belay that “comic weblogs are dead” talk, mister! (As opposed to “the nature of discussion on the comicsweblogosphere is changing” talk, as Neilalien mentions.)
I’m not fooling myself…I know that the whole weblog fad won’t last forever, and that sooner or later the current weblog boom will probably scale itself back to a relative handful of dedicated webloggers, leaving the desiccated corpses of abandoned journals and link-logs and Myspace accounts scattered across the internet. I mean, I was there for the late-70s CB radio boom, I’ve seen it happen before. (“Pathfinder Jr.” in case you were wondering. Don’t ask.)
But so long as weblogs are around, some percentage of them (about 0.000000002%) will be comic book weblogs, so comic ‘blogs won’t go away until ‘blogs in general do. But I’m sure whatever follows weblogs as the primary form of World Wide Web communication, there’ll be people using it to talk about the funnybooks…including me, I’m sure. (Unless it’s online interpretive dance videos, in which case I draw the line.)
Pal Ian talks about Infinite Crisis and brings up a point that I had been pondering myself…if the stated goal of IC was to “lighten the tone” of the DC Universe, why use a crossover series to do it? Why not just start writing the books with a lighter tone?
Well, money, of course.
As everyone knows (or should know), comic book crossovers started out as a way to get kids exposed to characters they otherwise wouldn’t read. A Green Lantern fan would see that he’s in a Justice Society story in the latest All-Star Comics, so he’d want to buy that comic, too. In the process, maybe he’d see GL’s fellow Society member the Flash, and think “hey, that Flash character is pretty neat…maybe I should look for his comic book, too!”
And so on.
That’s what I see Infinite Crisis doing as well, particularly with the tie-in series. “This mini-series shows you all the cool super-villains we have, this mini-series has our magical and oddball heroes, this one has our space heroes….” I’m not a huge Batman fan, by any means, but IC got me to buy Omac Project, nominally a Batman mini-series. A lot of people bought the “Sacrifice” issue of Wonder Woman that tied into the series, and stuck around for further issues.
You may not care for the content of the series (and judging by at least one page-by-page allegedly-humorous overview of IC that pal Dorian tried to warn you about, some of you really don’t), you can’t really fault DC on its planning. This is about as well-structured a “crossover event” I’d ever seen from the Big Two, that genuinely has readers excited about what’s going on, and has them looking forward to, and buying, titles that they might not ordinarily have bought. I’m hearing very little griping about about being “forced” to buy IC tie-ins as well, which is certainly unusual for a crossover event like this.
Note, that by “readers” in that last paragraph, I mean “people who come into our store and buy comics from us and discuss them with us as well.” I don’t mean “people I see complaining online, who are probably buying IC and all its tie-ins anyway.” In the wild, at least in my direct experience, IC is being quite well-received, thank you.
On a related note, just prior to IC‘s release, I was singing an Infinite Crisis theme song, much to Dorian’s amusement, though darn if I can remember it now. The lyrics aren’t the ones in this post’s title (I stole that from the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ersatz theme song for Undersea Kingdom), but I sure wish I knew what they were. (This would be sign #343 that I’ve sold comics for too long.)
So Dorian and I were discussing that the latest issue of a particular toy magazine seemed to have several articles that weren’t toy-related, and in fact could have been easily put, with little or no changes, in other magazines from the same publisher. And we were thinking, how hard is it to stay on topic? Okay, I can understand if you want to diversify the mag a little, but why cover the same ground your sister magazines already cover?
And that got us on the topic, somehow, of how much we write on our goofy little weblogs, here. Dorian’s topics are a little more wide-ranging, discussing horror movies, music and such, but I’m pretty much 98% comics (with the occasional Star Wars and Star Trek and Snakes on a Plane post). Just on a whim, I took all my posts from the last month and cut ‘n’ pasted them into a word processing file. It came to about 62 pages, without images. If you take out the non-comics posts, it comes to about, say, 60 pages. That’s enough to fill a small magazine (well, fanzine), just on my own. If we were to add in the comics-related writing from Dor, pal Tom, and pal Ian, we could have a respectably-sized publication.
Of course, putting out a comics magazine in this market would almost certainly have us looking back on the milk ‘n’ honey days of weblogging, where the money was free and easy. Plus, I’d need to find an editor to trim down my writing to something an actual human being could read.
So, I’m not sure what my point is really, beyond “I type too much.” If you read all my crazy-talk on a regular basis, I appreciate it.
If you’ve read this far, here’s a gallery/listing of spy comics drawn by this person when he was a kid. Gave me some nostalgic feelings for my own young comic-drawing days, it did.
