The whys and wherefores

Before I really jumped into this new blog adventure, I did want to take a moment and explain what it is that I'm trying to do here. The first reason for starting this is pretty simple, in a few short months I will be starting my PhD studies at the University of Nottingham and will spend the next three years working on a dissertation that focuses on critical theory and comic books. With that in mind, I wanted to get back in the habit of writing about comics. Though I have spent a lot of time teaching and dealing with comics in the last few years, I definitely haven't been writing about them. Grading lots of papers about them, but not really doing enough of my own work with them. My second reason is a bit more complicated. While teaching comics, I started to see all the different ways that comics are read, the ways that people connect to them and what their particular tastes are. I wanted to investigate my own reading habits and look at why I read what I read, why my weekly pull list looks the way it does and maybe get a few people interested in some comics or pick up something new. Now, in hopes of answering any questions you all may still have, I now present a fake conversation with a well respected journalist.

Clark: So, what exactly are you going to be doing with this blog?

Me: Taking a page from Nick Hornby's "What I've Been Reading" column in  The Believer, I plan to look at my weekly comic reading habits and talk about the good, bad, weird, and all the connections I find in between.

C: So you are going to be giving us book reviews?

M: No, there are plenty of good weekly comic review sites out there, CBR, Comic Vine, Comic Alliance and iFanboy, just to name a few. I really don't want to do reviews. One problem with those is that you can't write a review in the real world. You can't talk about how your week has effected your reading habits, your past experiences with a writer or an artist or if you just happened to read something after making out with your girlfriend. You have to review in a vacuum, and that just isn't the way we actually read or nearly as much fun to write about.

C: So do we have to worry about you being biast?

M: Oh, absolutely, I am biast, that's just going to be the way things are. I will definitely like something you may hate, and vice versa. But that is okay. While I do want people to try new things through this, I hope I don't stop someone from reading something they enjoy. We all have different tastes and I am glad for that. I definitely have a tendency to read more DC books than Marvel books in a month, and I tend to follow my favorite writers regardless of what they are writing. So yeah, I can be biast, but hopefully that will add to things.

C: So this is just about comics, week in, week out?

M: Hardly. Again, I don't believe you can read anything in a vacuum, especially with how much they try and cross promote, adapt, and target comics. I want this to be about the larger world that I exist and read comics in.

C: Since you are going to get a PhD, is this going to get really academic and hard to understand?

M: Well, I will probably drop in a few terms here and there that apply to my studies (Broke Back, Women in Refrigerators, etc.) but this won't be an intro to critical theory and visual rhetoric course. I will be doing a lot of work with queer and feminist theory for my PhD work, and that will probably bleed in just a bit, I hope it doesn't get to irritating.

C: Well, thank you for your time, I guess the best thing to do is read your first major post.

M: Please do, and enjoy.