Blog Transformation

So this hiatus didn’t really go the way I expected it to. There was a lot less “not writing blog posts about comics” and a lot more “writing blog posts about comics.” Nevertheless, I’ve had some time to think things over, and it looks like I’ve figured out a few things I want to take forward from here.

First of all, there’s going to be a lot fewer comics reviews here. Comics reviews are relatively easy, especially when you don’t have anything in mind that you want to rant/enthuse about. But really, they’re pretty boring, both for you guys and for me, too. And it’s depressing to look at your schedule for the week and start planning out when you’re going to write a dozen comics reviews every week. It’s even worse when you get home from work and realize that your leisure activity for the evening is going to involve reviewing comics when you’d rather be doing just about anything else.

I also got a look at the pull-list from my local comics shop recently, and it was a distressingly long document. And I kinda realized that there were a lot of comics I was reading just for the sake of the blog, not because I was getting a lot of enjoyment out of them. And that’s insane. My house is crammed to the gills with comics that I don’t care about. Why keep that up? There’s no reason to.

So I went through my pull-list and cut more than half. I dropped a lot of titles I’ve enjoyed but have gotten less enthusiastic about — Batman, Spider-Man, Fatale, Dial H, Morning Glories, Snarked, Unwritten, even B.P.R.D. They’re still good comics, but I’m mostly reading them because I feel like I should be, not because I want to. I’m releasing myself from any self-imposed obligation to keep reading them.

And from now on, I’ll review comics if I feel like it. If I don’t have anything I’m enthusiastic about, I won’t review anything. If I find something outstanding, unusually enjoyable, unusually un-enjoyable, I’ll let ya know. But I enjoy this blog a lot more when I’m not forcing myself to do review after review after review. I have more fun commenting on comics news, analyzing comics, typing up some random silliness, and even reviewing graphic novels and regular prose books.

So we’re gonna see if changing things up helps my overall sanity level, see if we can get me back to enjoying comics blogging again. If this works, fantastic. If it don’t work, ehh, what can you do?