About the blog

If there is one thing that I want to get across it is that comics are an important art form. 

In 2007, SUNY Stony Brook awarded me a Master's Degree in Philosophy for a thesis largely focusing on Kantian Metaphysics and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. My plan was to create a new critical vocabulary for the study of comics as high art.

Now that I'm out of the academy my exposure is limited to what I pick up here in Austin and from podcasts like Indie Spinner Rack, so I want to reach out to communities of like minded readers and to up the profile of comics. I feel that part of doing that is maintaining a few commitments to those of you who are kind enough to read this and the artists that share their brilliance with the world. So here is the mission:

1) Every Monday I will publish a post of either reviews or bits of house keeping like this one. Hopefully one day I will have interviews...

2) Because I want this to be a resource for ongoing discussion and not a soap-box, each post will be tagged to allow you to search out my thoughts on a particular artist or on comics in general.

3) I am interested in sequential art as art and not a given genera, so my reviews will focus on artist styles of narrative storytelling favoring form over content.

4) I will try to keep the reviews updated with info on where you can purchase the books and contact the artists.

5) Out of the deep admiration I have for anyone who puts their art out there, I will not publish any reviews on anything self-published and self-marketed without getting it approved by the artist.

6) I won't review anything that I wouldn’t generally recommend and I will try to give warnings if I feel a particular work might be too offensive or difficult for a given audience. (I have a 10 year old nephew who breathes comic books. I get the need for rating.)

That is what you can expect here. Hopefully, there will be audience participation. There are three ways that I would especially love to get feedback from you the reader.

Please, please leave comments. They are always welcome. Don't hesitate to share any positive or negative feedback about this blog. Positive discussion about the books reviewed is the point. The only caveat is if you pick up something I suggest and you don't like it, I ask that you focus your criticism on my failure to properly represent the work and live up to point 6 of the above. You don't have to agree with me, but I ask that you remain polite to the artist and those of us who do like their work.

I want to encourage you to get involved in the comic book community. It is still small enough that most artists are reasonably approachable. Most have websites or blogs which make fan mail easy. They tend to do lots of book signing and conventions which I should be highlighting according to point 4. If you do get a chance to meet them, ask if you can take a picture of yourself with them and post to the review.

If any of the artists read and especially like my review, I hope you want to help build the content I offer. Please contact me to do an interview by e-mail or locally around one of our Austin conventions. Contact me if you would be willing to share an image or images of a page from the book in the progress of composition. It would be extremely cool whether it is just a quick photo of the page with the pencil lines intact or images from the stages of completion.

And let me know if there is something you want me to review