Something

I felt like I should put something up on the blog tonight because I've got pieces to write for other sites this week that are not yet started, plus day job stuff, plus preparing to move into a new house stuff. Now seemed like the best time, despite a lack of topic. So I'm just tossing some whatevers out there.

I do not envy the retailers who have to make the same kinds of "what looks good?" decisions I do but for a whole bunch of customers, real and hypothetical, every single week. Read this for more on that from a retailer's perspective.

I've been so lazy about my reading lately. Even lazier about my writing. It's fall now, which means amazing weather, and that means I'm not eager to hole up in my own head and do the comicbook thing. 

They're calling it All-New X-Factor instead of Uncanny X-Factor, which I hate. The team won't always be new, but it could always be weird.

I haven't seen a superhero movie since Iron Man 2. Not because I'm taking a stand or some such self-important bullcrap, I just don't see movies very much anymore. I hear there have been some good ones, so someday I reckon I'll watch those.

My parents visited me last weekend (not the weekend that just happened, the one before) and per usual I got comics from my dad that he's never going to read again, plus I lent him some stuff of mine he was interested in. He brought me the first few issues of three or four of Marvel's current X-Men books, ditto the Avengers titles, a bunch of the current-running Iron Man, and what is now my second copy of the recent Silver Surfer issue of Daredevil. I'm excited to read everything not because I think it's going to be good, but because it was all free and will educate me in more detail about the current state of the Marvel U.

I don't pay attention to convention news as it's coming out. I wait for people to sort through it for me and publish overviews of what to look forward to. Also there will be months of promos and interviews and previews and whatnot for any new series, so I always hear about anything that might interest me in time.

I hope Loose Ends never publishes its fourth and final issue, so that the series itself is forever a loose end. Surely someone else has thought of this?

House to Astonish is back, and I am literally giddy.

Someday I'm going to take the time to go through my entire collection and maximize my bag space. No more four-issue series in six-issue bags, or arcs cut in half by bags too small to hold them, or any of that irksome mess. I do swear it!

Occasionally I find all the new comics in a given week exceptionally blah, and then I worry it's just a mood I'm in. Like maybe I just read something spectacular but was too grumpy to let it all in. I reassure myself that I'll reread it all eventually, but that's probably not true in every case, and I'd hate to go on forever thinking the wrong thing about a comic because of external circumstances.

Superman and The Punisher are both characters that have never quite connected with me, no matter what stories/series I've seen them in. I understand, I think, what others see in them, but I'm just not all that interested in the kinds of themes they're built to explore. No ill will, though. They're important figures and I don't begrudge them their audiences.

Oh god how do I tag this post? Do I just let it sit in the ether unlabeled? Perish the thought! And yet...

Order of the Stick just celebrated its tenth anniversary last month. CONGRATS! That's a series that means a lot to me, and though I wasn't there at the beginning, I've been following it for more than half its life, and have read the whole thing several times. It's been a reliable companion.

I have a much harder time with animal death in comics than I do in life. I can't make sense of that, but there it is. Not like moral outrage, just emotional spasm.

The hype around Afterlife with Archie is working on me.

Movie and video game ads in comics from the '80s are the shit. I have learned so much about so many failed entertainment projects from the era through Wikipediaing what I see in the ads. Also, lots of odd comicbook series I'd never heard of before. So there, finally, value in the ad pages. It only takes like 25-30 years for them to shift from obnoxious to interesting.

Sometimes I like to imagine a day when somehow, magically, all of the ongoing series I'm following wrap up their major storylines at the same time, and all the the mini-series I'm reading end then, too. There I'd be with a newfound sense of comicbook closure, awash in the glow of certainty and finality. Would I dare read another issue ever again, knowing it would pierce the bubble?