Thought Bubble and posting frequency

I got back from Thought Bubble today. I thought I'd been to comic conventions before now. I was wrong: I had been to media events with a bit of comics. Their publicity calls it a "celebration of sequential art in all its forms", and I can't put it any better than that. That's not just a slogan: it's true. Something very special happened on that cold November weekend in Leeds.

I was very nervous about the whole thing, and got cold feet last week (partly about my health), and seriously considered cancelling. This would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I was introduced to so many people there's no way I'm going to recall all their names. And people who'd met me before - from other conventions - remembered me! I'm still confused when this happens, as if I think I'm invisible or nondescript or something. I went to panels with proper advice about writing, I chatted, and I saw what people were doing. And I saw what people weren't doing. At the afterparty someone asked me directly: do I have something to say? And it came to me: I do, and my worries have largely been about technical proficiency. And that universal exhortation of "write!" indicates, isn't it better to say it badly than to leave it unsaid?

So, I'm going to see about writing comics rather than writing about comics. I was working on a storyline for the continuation of one idea in the bar (that's for an idea I'd already got an issue of written, and people - admittedly my friends - have laughed at it), and fixed the problems in another on the train home. There are others I haven't even got to yet. I still have no idea about how to find collaborators for the small detail of artwork †, but I can see that developing strong ideas and scripts will probably help with that. And having made a few contacts can't have hurt.

I don't think me continue to post daily here is sustainable. It was really good to get back into the habit of writing things that weren't code or documentation, but it look a large chunk of my free time, and I'm in any case worried that if I continue like at this rate then I'll running out of things to say about Claremont's run (although I've got some corkers lined up). I'm queued up to the Mutant Massacre at the moment (bar one post about New Mutants #44 which I'd been avoiding but am now greatly looking forward to writing, having had the benefit of reading Si Spurrier and Tan Eng Huat's X-Men Legacy in the interim). It'd be too much fiddling to change the post schedule for all of them, but after then I'm going to drop to weekly.

† By which I mean I have no idea how I am going to go get the nerve to go up to someone and say HI YOUR ART IS GOOD LET'S TALK ABOUT MY IDEAS, rather than that I don't understand the basic mechanics of it.

post schedule and frequency

So, I started this daily in February (having been inspired by a fun experience at the London Super Comic Con), got a bit ill, couldn't face reading any more Roy Thomas issues, and stopped writing posts. I resumed in July, decided to make them weekly instead, and have now accumulated a several month backlog. This was clearly a bit silly. I'm now setting them to post daily until the end of August, then we'll see what happens. If I don't change it again, then this should means I hit Giant-Size #1 on August 25th.

(Currently just written up #97 and going to start reading #98. Not long now before I pass Alexa Reads X-Men, but I doubt I'll ever catch up with SpaceSquid's Year X. Which is totally worth a read if you enjoy people being affectionately critical about old X-Men comics, which apparently you do if you're reading this.)

The Project

I started reading X-Men at the age of twenty-seven, in 2006.  For some reason, my latent tendencies towards fandom sprung into growth that year, as I got massively in to both Marvel comics and Doctor Who, more or less at the same time.  At the start of the year I probably couldn't name all the Doctors, or tell you what a Sentinel was - but by 2007 I had strong feelings about Paul McGann being excellent in the audios, and was dressing up in costume as Nocturne. Who knew what is supposedly mainstream culture could provide such outlets for obscurantism?

Doctor Who and the X-Men have obvious differences of form, but share certain commonalities.  At the trivial level, they are both enormous narratives, created by multiple hands, and well beyond normal human comprehension, that debuted within a few months of each other in 1963.  They occupy similar headspace, too - they share a certain progressive mindset, and have had profound influences on people growing up.  But not me.  I was 10 when Doctor Who was cancelled - which I was disappointed at but could hardly pretend was a trauma.  And I never read comics when I was little - my only exposure to the X-Men was from their guest appearances in cartoons.  So I come to both of these things as an adult, and perhaps one with too great a sense of irony.  The operatic conventions of genre - the revolving door to the afterlife, the midunderstanding fights preceding a team-up, the retcons within retcons opening up nuance within stories - all these I enjoy as a spectacle.  And what a magnificent ride that Marvel universe has provided over the last 8 years.

Lots of people seem to have blogged about watching all of Doctor Who. Few seem to have attempted this with X-Men. I vaguely started in 2008, but gave up. A blog will help me with discipline. I also hope to track the development of the ideology of the X-Men, and of details of characterisation and setting that you can't just look up on the Marvel Wikia, which tends to fold retcon on retcon.

But that's yet to come, if we ever make it.  For now, we start in September 1963, and proceed at a post per comic per day.  Decisions about the scope of this project (as if the mere reading of all of Uncanny were not insane enough) will be made when we come to them - we have Cape Citadel to get to.