About This Blog
This blog grew out of my other comic book site Art and Artifice.
And it continues to grow, nearly daily, though it can be neglected for a week - or longer - at a time if I am under heavy deadline pressures on a project.
In January 2008 the site was revamped to work as a PHP site, and I changed the name from "Comic Atomic."
Primarily the site contains a number of comic book reviews and a lot of miscellaneous artwork and photos.
About the Reviews and a Complaint about the Business of Comic Books
I try to approach each comic as an independent item; it is flabbergasting (what a terrific word) to discover that the major comic book companies (DC, for example) do not bother to interconnect their multi-series pamphlet comics in even a miniscule courteous way for the wayward reader, such that picking up issue (say) #4 will often contain nary an indication of what has transpired in issue #1-3. This means #4 can be a near meaningless jumble of nonsense and characters and dramatic scenes without context. It is as if everything is intended for the collected "graphic novels" (neé 'albums') that traffic the shelves of chain bookstores. But if you buy your $2.99 USD (or $3.99 or whatever) pamphlet comic expecting it to function as a pamphlet comic, you're in for a surprise.
Of course if the tale is a retread of a hundred (or thousand) other comic book tales, then following the story (and being ahead of the story, actually) is no mean feat. Still, the fundamentals of story telling are being lost in too many instances. Plots malfunction and the whole mania of character "arc" is lost when you're missing a few issues. (Not that possessing all of the issues doesn't mean the same malformed craftsmanship might still sabotage the whole enterprise. What has become of the editors that once policed these things before they were published?)
A Medium Like No Other
And so it is easy to complain about the state of the industry. With movie-licensing money providing a strange intravenous support, a small corral of major characters pulls along a whole shipload of minor and unknown 'properties' that struggle onward for the pool of readers that should have been growing right along with the Manga explosion and the various other tie-ins that are easy connecting-rods for comic books into film, TV, books and the whole open market of literature at large. But still comics operates in a select ghetto, with some notable break-outs. The patient isn't terribly unhealthy, but he/she isn't so very healthy either.
But it is a unique medium, and it seems to respond so well to the right doodler and writer. And to them, I salute!
If you'd like to say something to me about it all, go here.
[This page Updated August 1, 2010]
