The state of comic blogging

The Tearoom of Despair started 15 years ago now, and writing for it is something I still hugely enjoy, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon, (apart from next week, where I use the excuse of a holiday to go a bit Mad Max on everything).. I still do a lot of writing in my day job, but that's all hard news, and this remains an outlet for all the bullshit that I don't do there. I can use as many adjectives as I like here.

I began the blog just at the right time - just as the first wave of wonderful bloggers about comics started to wind down. For most of the 2000s, I had marvelled at the regular delights the comic blogging community served up on both new and old comics, easily finding regular writers to follow.

Very few of these writers are still doing anything like this - I still always think of Mike Sterling as the godfather of comics blogging and he's still out there in the trenches, and J Caleb Mozzocco still updates his Every Day Is Like Wednesday blog with some sharp insights at least once a month. But many of the writers got paying gigs which supplanted the need to share their thoughts for free, while many just moved into social media spaces before slowly fading away.

I miss Johnny Bacardi and Dorian Wright and Jog and Patrick Meaney and the Savage Critics and all the others and I know they pop up in random places like The Comics Journal, but it ain't the same. 

Some are coming back - I met my good pal Nik through his Spatula Forum (he met his lovely wife in the Cerebus The Aardvark letters column, which makes meeting through a blog seem relatively sane), and never miss an edition of his current My Impression Now - while others like the mighty Tegan O'Neill are making a good go of it with daily video reviews, but I could always do with more. The world could always do with more.

Luckily, there are writers like Tom Ewing, who has been doing an absolutely fascinating series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, in all its problematic glory. It's so nice to see someone engage with the work like Tom has, and really dig into it. He doesn't shy away from how Dave Sim lost his goddamn mind even faster than he lost his audience, but that doesn't mean there are interesting things to say about his work. 

I do have hopes that with social media shitting itself to death, and a general lack of authenticity that AI-generated content is causing, that the blog format will come back, and that trusted voices will take precedence over rambling brands. The world has moved on, but comics blogging ain't dead yet.