Blog News

Hello my friends,

Eagle-eyed readers will no doubt recognize that I have all but stopped posting entirely over the last couple weeks, save for one post about cancelled books (still a pity). Here's the thing: working a full-time job and living a full-time life makes reviewing every major Marvel release every week somewhat untenable. It's a wall I've been up against for six or so months now but one I stubbornly refused to acknowledge for much of that time, leading to many late and hurried posts as the year has gone on. As such, despite my desire to make it two years straight reviewing every issue (WHY would anyone want to do that?? Even as I type that, it sounds more insane and OCD than just about anything else I've ever done), I'm cutting myself off.

There are plenty of issues that come with reviewing so many comics so often. The first is, of course, the time dedicated to it. I love writing and I love comics so that was a sacrifice I was willing to make, particularly when I was job-hunting and otherwise unoccupied. As the obligations of my day-to-day life ramped up, my time for comic reviewing quickly nosedived (I could make a graph and it would be...well, it'd be what you'd expect). The second (and perhaps more important to me) issue is that reviewing every single comic makes you kind of hate comics. As I said above, and as the very existence of this blog for the last nearly two years should prove, I love comics. I've always been someone enamored with story and especially with characters. There's something absolutely magical about the entire comic conceit, particularly seen in superhero comics. Thanks to the serial nature of the product, we've gotten to see characters grow and change with the times. A character created 70 years ago but still going today will very clearly have some peaks and valleys, the way that any real human would. Sure, the stories are fantastical and plenty of the changes have been outlandish for certain characters, but there's no other medium that I know that has the ability to evolve like this. There's an argument to be made against stories lasting so long and I absolutely understand and often agree with that argument, but watching a character travel from writer to writer and from artist to artist over actual generations is something awe-inspiring to me. As the weeks went on, I found myself dreading books I'd have to read and regretting the time I was spending on comics (an argument could be made about the time I spend on fiction anyway, but at least I personally wasn't making it) and particularly on comics I don't like while comics I really wanted to read from other publishers sat there unread (yes, I see you BLACK SCIENCE and FATALE). It's a place I don't want to be.

So what does this all mean for the blog? That's a little harder to explain (and maybe why I should have waited on this very post, but I didn't want to let this poor blog just sit and stagnate longer without reason). The ultimate plan is to go bigger. I know. Stupidly, my response to "the work is piling up too quickly and I can't handle it" is "I should do more." But it won't really be "I should do more." It'll be "we should do much more." Whatever form the next step takes will come with added help and probably a shifted focus. I certainly won't review every book every week (another flaw with that method, while we're finding more and more, is that many books are being released more frequently, meaning I was reviewing the same series a couple times a month and things weren't changing enough to actually make for a meaningful review), rather probably focusing on a few books every week. There will be more to it but I can't really reveal details until we've made a few more decisions. As ever, I will keep you posted.

Finally, as this blog ends or morphs into the new project, I want to again deeply thank everyone who has ever come by here. Whether you were a regular reader, someone who somehow managed to find this blog despite poor SEO, a friend or a friend of a friend checking Twitter at the right time, someone with Google alerts for the phrase "Marvel cancels" (I've been redirected to my own site from that particular phrase), someone drawn here to snag a cover image from one of my reviews, it doesn't matter. Whatever brought you here, whether it encouraged you to stay or not, thank you. As much as I tell myself this blog is simply an exercise for writing more often or for letting people see my writing or just to say things I want to say, I'd be lying if the entertainer part of me didn't want constant attention. It's nice feeling like I'm not just shouting into a vacuum about how much I don't like ALL-NEW INVADERS (I'm not reviewing right now but guys, this last week's issue was really bad). So again, thank you.

I'll let you guys know more as things develop (or, hey, even as they don't) and please feel free to keep checking in over here for little updates I feel like giving about this or about the comics world (as I start to switch things over, I expect I'll still want some sort of a platform on which to talk about comics). As ever, thank you once again.

Tim Nicastro
Marvels: A Marvel Comic Blog That Often Fails To Review Movies In Any Meaningful Way