Writing some words for NeoText, sometimes even in the right order

The Tearoom of Despair has been a daily blog for a couple of years now, and I plan to continue it in that format for the foreseeable future, because it's easier to have a few easy paragraphs about some random shit every day, rather than than 1000 painful words about some random shit two or three times a week.

But I still love really getting stuck into a particular subject, and I have been fortunate enough this year to have been given the opportunity to write three longer essays for the excellent NeoText Review website about three of my favourite things in comics - Love and Rockets, Scream! and the comics of Evan Dorkin.

They all go on a bit, but I mainly had one point to each of them that I wanted to excavate and examine. The Love and Rockets piece was part of my ongoing quest to prove that Jaime Hernandez's comics are only getting deeper and richer every year; the Scream! essay was all about paying homage to a lot of great and creepy art that has rarely been seen in the past 37 years; and my most recent thing - a tribute to the never-ending brilliance of Evan Dorkin's comics - just went up the other week and looks at the comics produced from beneath the stifling blanket of Dorkin's own self-worth and how we consume art that sometimes hates us.

Writing each of these things and getting them published outside the cozy confines of the Tearoom brought me an enormous feeling of well-being, and I'm keen to do some more in the next year, (although I'm going to try and avoid the whole career overview thing, because that shit is really, really hard. Next time, I'm going to try and dig in on one issue or something).

Full credit to Neotext Review editor Chloe Maveal, who has been absolutely kind and generous with her time and feedback. Good editors are hard to find, so it's a pleasure to work with the best, (especially when they're so willing to take a chance with people who send in random pitches out of the blue). Apart from the very occasional guest writer, nobody has ever cast a second eyes over one word of the Tearoom of Despair, and that lack of an editor really shoes sometimes. 

But having someone call me out for blathering and pointing out that I'm making no sense sometime is really invigorating, and I look forward to doing more in the new year.