Comics Meta

You may have noticed that I have not written anything about comics for a while. I have been feeling a bit dissatisfied with my comics writing. One obvious problem was that no one was really reading what I had to say on the subject (apart from comics creators googling their names). It only seems to be my friends and acquaintances who read Inuit Panda, and they have all either outgrown comics or never liked them in the first place.

Not having any readers is not an insurmountable problem, as writing about comics is still useful for me as a way of organising my thoughts. A bigger issue is that I was finding it difficult to say anything that was that interesting. I was attempting to review every issue of every comic I bought. On the face of it, this would seem like an ideal blog thing to do, as it provides a ready made continuous resource of things to write about. In practice, though, most issues do not work as self-contained things, and they are largely created as sections in an ongoing story. When an issue is chapter three in a five part story it is difficult to say anything interesting that is not basically a rehash of what was said about chapter two.

So, what I will do henceforth is write only about individual issues of comics when they are particularly noteworthy – in a good or bad way. I might also do overviews a title when a story finishes or perhaps try to sketch an image of where one is going from the opening issue. Hopefully this will be a bit more interesting.

I am also hoping to contribute material to a comics culture website that noted comics person Martin Skidmore is going to be producing. For that I will need to seriously up my game, as he has some heavy hitters signed up and I do not want to stand out too much as some subliterate bozo. When that gets going I will post a link to it.

An inuit panda production