Elsewhere...New Blogs!

Here's what else I've been up to online lately.



We started Chapter 2 of Kill All Monsters! this week. I'm curious to know what people are thinking of it so far, but I also realize that it's early days yet and a lot of you are waiting until we have more up so you can read in larger chunks. No worries, I do that too. But if you are keeping up and have thoughts (encouraging or constructive), I'd love to hear them.

I reviewed Return of the Dapper Men for Robot 6. It's a lovely steampunk fairy tale and goes in my Top Five Stories Ever About Childhood and Growing Up (alongside stuff like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan). It's as thought-provoking as it is charming.

And finally, I apparently went crazy on Friday and started two new blogs. Both are spin-offs of this one, featuring stuff that I used to cover a lot of here, but have had to cut back on for various reasons. Dear Dairy: The Cownt's Blog will cover vampires and other classic monsters while also digging a bit deeper into the Cownt's world. Amazon Village is all about tough, heroic women.

The reason for spin-off blogs is that I still want to talk about monsters and adventurous women, but can do without having that content increasing the size of my daily pile. So this blog will get top priority (focusing mostly on sea and jungle adventures) and I'll work on the other two as I find time. Hopefully that will be regularly. Add them to your RSS reader. Follow them. Love them.

Elsewhere... Best Comics of 2010

Hm. I should've done this yesterday to follow up the movies posts, but bucking years of tradition (and contrary to my earlier prediction), I came up with a list of my ten favorite comics from 2010. I share that link with the other Robot 6eteers, so there are lots of great comics to be discovered there. And for even more comics recommendations, check out Comic Book Resources' Top 100 list. I got to do a few of the write-ups for those too.

It's kind of interesting, I guess, that not all the books I picked for Tom Spurgeon's year-end Five for Friday made it into my final list, but there are a couple of reasons for that. First is that Five for Friday's rules require fast thinking and I never do my best thinking quickly. But I also took to heart Spurgeon's criterion that we simply list five books that we liked without having to take into account their quality relative to everything else we read during the year.

Anyway, you can easily guess my Number One pick and I did a full review of it for Robot 6. I also managed to squeeze in another critical favorite before the end of the year, Charles Burns' X'ed Out. And to start 2011 off, I questioned how much of the Silver Age should really be a model for adventure comics today.

One final piece that I'm pretty happy with is the interview I did with Archaia's Editor-in-Chief Stephen Christy and the creators of Mouse Guard (David Petersen) and Return of the Dapper Men (Jim McCann and Janet Lee) about the sell-outs of Dapper Men and the Mouse Guard spin-off, Legends of the Guard. As I say in the interview's intro, I usually ignore press releases about sell-outs, but Archaia's a great company and at their C2E2 panel I was impressed with how honest and forthcoming they are about their business strategies. Enough so that I felt like this was an opportunity to learn more about what selling out really means - at least for them as a small publisher - and what they did as a company and creators to make that happen. They were even more open and helpful than I hoped and I learned a lot. Hopefully readers will find something enlightening and interesting in the interview too.