I Got A New Sensation

It's difficult to imagine now, but at one time Comic Book Galaxy had tens of thousands of daily visitors,
competed directly with CBR and Newsarama, and occasionally got into kerfuffles that had the Comicon.com
message boards burning up with outrage, obfuscation, and innuendo. We pissed off the pros by reporting news they wanted buried, and pissed off the fans by telling them their taste in comics was worse than the taste of sweaty donkey balls on a hot August night.

Hell, as editor and publisher I even pissed off many of the scores of contributors we had; some justified, due to my immaturity and unevolved people management skills (you've come a long way, baby!), and some
unjustified and unreasonable, as when we asked our dozens of contributors to try to expand their horizons a
little in what they chose to cover. I think the straw that broke the camel's back was when three or four writers all felt the need to write at length about that week's issue of Defenders by Busiek/Larsen. Hey, I enjoyed the kicky, neo-retro stylings of that series as much as anyone, but how many reviews of the same Marvel book does one website need every week?

Admittedly, to get CBR-sized readerships, you have to cover the hell out of Marvel and DC to the detriment of all other publishers, and our failure to genuflect at the corporate comics publishers' dirty, stinky feet may have played some small role in the diminishing size of CBG's readership over the years. But the main factor in the leeching off of readers lays squarely at my own dainty, highly-pedicured tootsies. Over the past twelve years, my interest in comics has waxed and waned, my broadcasting career has had spectacular highs and devastating lows, and my children have grown up. All of those factors and more we'll file under "personal matters" that have sometimes made it impossible for me to give Comic Book Galaxy the attention I have always wanted to give to it. When longtime CBG buddy/partner/pal Chris Allen and I launched Trouble With Comics a few years ago, it attained a popularity that almost immediately made Comic Book Galaxy seem obsolete. And then TWC kind of petered out, and, and...

I'm not here to make excuses. I have a bunch of websites that I've been passionate about, then neglected, then gotten excited about again, or just gave up on. I've been writing about comic books on the internet since Bill Clinton was president, and in internet time, that's like two hundred years. I'm not even sure who I am writing this explanation/declaration of principles for, because I'm not even sure how much of an audience either CBG or TWC has left. I have about 150 followers on Twitter, and some are real-life friends, some are internet pals, and some, I have to assume, are interested in some way in what I have to say.

And lately, I have the itch to say a bit more. I don't know that either CBG or TWC will ever have the amount of news, reviews, interviews and columns that they did in their heyday. Probably not. Almost certainly not. But, and this is not the first time I've done this, I feel like it's time to raise my hand and say "Hey, if you are interested in what I do, what we've done, all of us who have written for CBG/TWC since September 1st, 2000 -- well, I am still here, and I hope to do some more of that, in some way."

I love Twitter, I'll admit it. I like how it allows me to stay connected to and converse with people who I am interested in. But 140 characters allows you to thumbnail one thought, not explore the universe of them that we all have inside ourselves. So I'm starting small, with a little daily news/commentary update, and we'll see if anything else at all materializes from this effort. My thinking at the moment is that my daily Galaxy Newsbrief will appear at CBG, and any longform commentaries or reviews will, as they have for the past few years, be posted to Trouble With Comics, where Chris and I are still cranking out the occasional piece. If more ambitious ideas begin to present themselves, I'll lay down and take a nap. If upon awakening, those ideas are still hanging around, maybe I'll do something about it.

All the old CBG archives are still there, by the way. See where it says "Old CBG" in the sidebar on the right? Click on that. Click on the reviews, interviews or commentary buttons on the menu bar. There's a lot of broken links, unfortunately, but there's also a lot of great old content, not only by me and Chris, but by award-winning names that you know, great writers who once hung their hat here.

So, for now, look for something here every day. Subscribe to the feed, tell your friends. The message isn't so much "We're back!" as "We're not dead yet." And I know that's not sexy. But for anyone who cared enough to read this far, I just want to be honest with you, and thank you for still being around. I appreciate it.