While clearing out the back cupboard in the spare room the other day, I found some print-outs of a bunch of columns that Mark Millar wrote for the CBR site in the early 1990s. I don't know why I had them, or why I had kept hold of them, but there they were.
And I actually thought about holding onto them, because I've always been weirdly attached to the writer's work, and because these columns don't seem to exist online anymore. They were lost, along with a lot of other great writing, during one of the comic site's periodic reboots, with hundreds of thousands of words flushed down the digital toilet.
We all thought the digital revolution would be a great way to archive things like columns over the years, but it turned out that it was just so much easier for everything to eventually disappear into the ether. In the end, it's so much easier to read printed fanzines from 1982 than it is to read something published online 20 years later, and if I got rid of these print-outs of Millar's column, I'd probably never read them again.
But then I actually read the columns and they were terrible, full of brash, boring arrogance and post-Loaded homophobia masquerading as banter, and I binned the lot. Pop cultural history is all well and good, but a lot of it is still completely worthless.
There is something good in digital footprints ultimately being so transient - I'm certainly glad there is no sign of the embarrassingly try-hard anti-Watchmen screed I put online in 1997 anywhere left on the web - and it's not like Millar has kept quiet since. All that old stuff can go now.
I'm glad they did a book of Warren Ellis' Come In Alone column at CBR. I would hate to lose some of that stuff, even if he acts like he doesn't believe much of what he was saying.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there are several different collections of Ellis' various columns, even some of his emails have been collected by Avatar. They hold up WAY better than Millar's.
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