Tomorrow is Gotham Calling’s 12th anniversary!
It has become a bit of a struggle to keep up with even a biweekly pace of longer posts, although hopefully this hasn’t affected their quality. It isn’t a matter of lack of ideas (my notes and unfinished drafts keep growing and morphing like the unstoppable force of Fleisher’s and Aparo’s Spectre…), just a question of time and energy to put them down.
Honestly, given my workload and other life stuff, I don’t see things getting easier in the next three years, but there is already enough material in the pipeline to make sure that, at least in the months ahead, the blog remains a reliable place where readers can pick up cool recommendations and/or amuse themselves with the quirks of comic books and movies. Next week, for instance, I’ll finally post the fourth installment of the reading guide for early 2000s’ Batman comics (which took a while to put together, not only because I mostly dislike this particular bit of that era, but also because inter-title continuity was a veritable damn mess!).
More than an endorsement and acritical encouragement of consumption of products of horrible corporations (and, sometimes, by great creators who also happen to be horrible people), Gotham Calling is about finding joy even among the filth – joy both for readers and for me, so I’m definitely sticking around (and certainly not outsourcing this shit to AI, which would pretty much defeat the purpose of this whole project). Meanwhile, you should still be able to get brief weekly reminders that comic covers can be awesome. Like this one:
Your blog is awesome, don´t worry about updates!
Happy anniversary!
I have a question for you: what do you think about the increased accessibility of older comics like via the DC Finest collections or digital? 12 years ago, a lot of this stuff was out of print – and still is – but now that’s changing. Does the democratization of comics sideline the expert?
Thank you both! I’m surely not the first to point out that we have been living through a golden age of comics in the past decade or so, not so much because of all the new stuff (although there is plenty of quality, entertainment, and experimentation going around), but also because of all the reprints and digitization, which have given us unprecedented access to a century of amazing works. So, even when the industry fails to reach the creative peaks of the past (EC in the 1950s, 2000AD in the 1970s-80s, DC in the late 1980s, Vertigo in the 1990s, Marvel in the early 2000s), every year there is something to be excited about for those who love the medium. Expertise becomes less a matter of accessibility than a matter of curiosity and willingness to engage… and I’m all for it. At its best, this can stimulate more interesting and informed conversations. (At its worst, though, we may end up with creators stuck in the past, more concerned with internal history than with entering in dialogue with the wider world and culture, but there is enough to feel pessimistic about in our doomed times, so I’d rather save at least this space for optimism…)