backing bored

It is: sad.  Sad that I just don’t have the time/energy to do those comic book reviews like I want to.  The way I want to do it will take time, and if I didn’t have a steady writing gig with the newspaper, you bet your sweet bippy that I’d be writing these reviews every week.  But because my urge to write is frequently given form at the job that pays me money, my comic reviews plans for this site are gone.  Unless I can find out a way to get some cash doing it, I need to figure out a way to motivate myself to review this stuff.  And that motivation doesn’t look like it’ll be here anytime soon.  But we’ll see.

Clearly, I was supposed to have started my comic book reviews weeks ago.  Months, maybe.  Things have been too crazy, and as such, I have not done shit.

Sorry.

So now I’m at work, it’s production day, and I have lots and lots of writing to do.  I will try to do them.

BUT!  I have a comic book of my own with my pal Collin David, and it’s called Coptopus.  I’ll have a page up about it soon (yeah right).  If you’re interested, e-mail me, and pay me money.  Yes.

Also: I have articles for Geek Monthly forthcoming…more on that as it develops and things get firmed up.  Won’t you check out my delicious portfolio?  I’m going to try hard to update semi-regularly.  Haha.

Love, Brian

I currently sit in my office in Ellenville, waiting to drive out to a local resort to speak with rabbis about the Passover celebrations they’ve recently brought to a prison and a drug rehab center, and it’s got me thinking: I should think up some kind of system for when I get my first comic reviews up on this thing.

I wrote the words semi-literate at the top of this blog-thing because I studied literature for something like eight  years (which is amazing, because in the grand scheme of it all, I know next to nothing), and I’ve been reading comics for even longer.  I’d like to, potentially, apply the rules of “close-reading” to my individual reviews.  Yes, I will try to give my opinion on whether or not it’s worth dropping three bucks or more on each book, but I want to qualify my assertions by discussing panels or stretches of dialogue in depth.

I’m going to try to get all snobby about it.

So, here then, are my sort of rules:

1) At least two issues of comics will be reviewed each week.  If only one book is reviewed, it will be of a longer format, such as a trade-paperback collection of comics, or a graphic novel.

2) There will be “direct quotation”–this includes dialogue or panels.  Unfortunately, I’m without scanning capabilities, but I will try my damndest to describe panels’ qualities and locations with as much depth and detail as possible

3) I will qualify all of my opinions; to wit, if a book sucks, I will try to find as much evidence as possible to justify my declaration.  Sure, I can come up with lots of reasons why books suck, many of them having only to do with my particular tastes, but I want to try and make this site as legit and as literate as possible.

4) Comics are literature and art; I will treat it as such.

5) No Rob Leifeld.  Too easy.

Now I’m off to see the Rabbis.

SHAZAM.

I’m new to this software, so I’ll probably be playing around with this for awhile before I get going, but this blog will have a point.

As it stands, I currently work full-time for the Ellenville Journal newspaper in New York’s Hudson Valley. Also, I’ve been doing some freelance work for Geek Monthly Magazine, though I haven’t yet had the opportunity to write too much comics-related stuff…which is where this comes in.

I’ve got a couple degrees in English, and I’ve always read comics, so I’d like to try and meld the two interests together here, in what I hope to be a weekly comics-review blog-space. Beyond reviews of what I pick up each week, I’ll see about posting reviews of trade paperbacks and the occasional movie here and there, all while posting comics-related thoughts as they occur to me. This is stuff I didn’t really want to do on my livejournal, which is becoming less used by the day.

So, hopefully, I’ll delete this post in favor of something more interesting, and we’ll get started right. Right? Right.