What Comic Book News Sites Do Wrong

Hey look, something dragged me out of my hole and brought me to my blog. It's a new day people and something good is going to happen (until I fall back down my hole again).

So things have been interesting as of late. Still holding down the day job and writing in my free time. I'm tired as all hell, but it's a good thing. At least that's what I tell myself before I go to sleep at night, haha. I kid.

So I was perusing the web the other day and came across an article on Blog@Newsarama.com by one of the new contributors to that blog Russ Burlingame. The article is entitled "What Comics Do Wrong" and focuses mainly on the Public Enemy comic but it does mention several other licensed comics as selling only "indie" numbers and being a disservice to the comic book community. As you can imagine I was a little annoyed by the comments, especially since they felt as though they were rooted in ignorance.

If you read his article, my response is in the comment section somewhere. I'll go ahead and repost my response here.

I can’t speak for any of the other books you mentioned but I can speak for Comic Book Tattoo. You claim that these “licensed” properties sell more like “indie” books and do more harm to the medium than help it.

If that was the case with CBT it wouldn’t have sold out at SDCC, the softcover would not have gone back to print, it would not have been on the featured tables in Barnes & Noble and it would not currently be the #3 best selling Image book and in the top 100 selling graphic novels on Amazon.com.

You comments also show that you didn’t bother to read CBT, instead you just lumped it in a category that you label as “just a piece of merchandising”.

The efforts from the almost 100 different contributors of CBT, as well as the editor Rantz Hoseley (who also contributed to the content), was nothing short of inspired. You really have no right to include CBT as an example of “What Comics Do Wrong” when you apparently have no experience with the material.

Maybe you read CBT from cover to cover and hated everything in it. If so, you’re entitled to feel that way, but you should do your research before you make claims that the book only sold a few thousand copies and “cheapens” the community.

Those involved with CBT are a very talented group of people and they all worked extremely hard to make sure the book would not only be able to stand on it’s own as a collection of good comics, but that it represented comics positively to those readers who may not be comic book fans.

It's frustrating when someone feels a need to include one of your works to try and prove a weak point to begin with. On top of that, that person has no real experience with the material and just spouts off with no facts to back up his argument. I see that sort of thing quite a bit in comic book "journalism" and it drives me nuts. People really should do a little research before they start typing out their thoughts.