A Comeback?

It is sunny and I feel motivated. Both of these things happen less often than I'd hope. I started this blog with grand ambitions. I hoped to tie it to a buddies 'Trek blog called Trek is not a Dirty Word' and then I hoped to rope in more people, each of us with our own '____ is Not a Dirty Word', with 'Pop is Not a Dirty Word' as the home base tying them all together. This never really panned out. My focus would have eventually been 'Comics is Not a Dirty Word' with an opening post about how so many people misuse terms like 'graphic novel' to avoid calling them what they are, 'comics'. I may have even written that post, who knows. It has been about two years since I last blogged and more than that since I kept it up with any regularity. Not coincidentally, I found a job after several months off around the same time I stopped writing the bulk of the posts here.

I have come to terms with the fact that I am an average writer, but I would like to get better. The only way to do that is to keep writing, so I am going to try to get back into the habit. I recently wrote a thing for a friends "'zine"/final project and it really made me realize how two years off had made me dramatically less comfortable with writing, especially in a format that other people might actually see. I am easing back in now. I do not even have a particular topic in mind for this post and I am going to stay away from adding images for now since that part was always the biggest headache. If I can keep this up for a few weeks, maybe I will start working on making things look pretty.

As I said, comics is the main thing I think about, but pretty much anything is going to be fair game here. Movies,  Portland, video games, television, whatever. Writing about comics is too depressing. I spend way too much time reading a lot of great people on comics (and other media) and I cannot compete with any of them at this point, but I do feel like throwing my thoughts in from time to time. David Brothers, Matt Seneca, Tucker Stone, Chris Sims, Tom Spurgeon, Joe McCulloch, Chris Mautner, Sean Collins, Laura Hudson, Tim Callahan, and on. Reading other people's opinions on comics the last year or two has been as big a time sync as reading actual comics, in the best way.

Living in Portland, you'd think I would have stumbled into some real life comics friends by now, and as great of friends as I have made, I haven't had much luck there. I blew two(!) job interviews with Dark Horse in 2007. I shop at Cosmic Monkey and have regularly interacted with comics artist Zack Soto there. I have volunteered at Stumptown at least twice. That is about it as far as comics interactions go, outside of you know asking someone to sign my shit, which I still have not figured out how to do without feeling super awkward. I have taken to shouting out my comics thoughts on Twitter to pretty much no one. There have been two exciting instances where someone heard me. One resulted in a long argument, 140 characters at a time, with a Forbes blogger about Watchmen. The other was today when I got a reply to a stray thought about the already overly talked about 'The Avengers' box office. I want to put my thoughts somewhere and I want to get better at writing what I am thinking in a format longer than 140 characters. I have a lot of spare time so I don't see why I should not at least attempt to get back into this.



Next time: a specific subject! perhaps...