Scott McCloud mentioned the Comixpedia face-lift. Generally I think we got a lot of overall positive feedback on the site from readers but not a lot (meaning almost nil) of notice from the emerging blog-o-sphere:comics. I suppose this blog, in part, is a way to try and interact more with this cool new conversation on the medium taking place on the web. Scott also mentioned girl-a-matic cartoonist Spike just got married. Unlike Ms. Spears let's hope Spike stays happily married for more than 24 hours.Pathetic Geek Stories leaves the onion and sets off on its own little website. These are of that young and cringe-worthy genre of diary comics. Still they can be quite good in a sort of Barry-esque way.Four Color Hell the comics blog with the coolest name, limps back to life. Johnny Barcardi just joined the group effort, so that should be worth watching. I'm a poor judge of many comics blogs though and I'll tell you why. I, like almost every other American male who had at least a certain threshold of geek-factor, went through a comic book phase. Read Marvel, DC. Luckily got ahold of American Flagg, so that was cool. But than got bored of the soap-opera-ness of the Marvel and DC books and stopped.I got into comics again from webcomics. And have enjoyed many of the fine quality comics on the Internet since. It has even led me back to reading comics in books (no, not superhero books and no I don't venture into comic book stores anymore). So I feel sort of up to speed on what I like and at least a passing familarity with what's good right now. I have no familiarity with what's bad or mediocre. And I don't care. I also have (outside of that brief period where I read comic books) zero familiarity with the history of comic books. And you know what, I don't care.It's history folks. Let's just treat comics like any other subset of written fiction for a moment, okay. I'm a reader – I like to read. So I'd be happy to read the greats of the past and I've read a few of those comics (Watchmen, of course, who hasn't. Several collected editions of Peanuts are well-worn). But 90 percent of the past of the comic book industry gives all outward appearance of being crap and I just have little interest in discussing it. Same goes with the present. X-Cousins? Superman Red? Ultimate New Fantastic Four? Make up as many titles as you want DC and Marvel. Unless it's actually compelling as a story – a stand-alone story – I'm not interested. I recognize that many others don't require this – it not only explains many DC and Marvel comic book lines but also the continued success of the Tom Clancy factory-of-monkeys-typing line of books.
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