Hey gang. I’m back. Cue the rad needle drop and the cool, slow-motion walking scene. You know, because there’s nothing more hip than blogs in the year 2023. Anyway, with my much ballyhooed about return to the form, I figured on covering a bit of my history here on the internet.

To my astonishment, I’ve been doing this off and on since 2004. After my Wizard internship, renowned author Alex Segura asked if I wanted to help out with The Great Curve, a comic blog he established after leaving the magazine. He had been an editor and my intern coordinator and I figured it would be a good way to keep my chops sharp while I was finishing up college. Plus it was a nice ego stroke knowing he thought I was good enough to help out. We would add our own commentary to comic news stories and could also try things out like my old, weird comic spotlight Kickin’ It Old School. I dug it until I wrote a thing that caused a bit of a storm in the comments and I decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation. Besides, it was my senior year and I needed to figure some things out. I only found out recently that TGC was the root system for the blogging collective Robot 6 which went on to be a part of Comic Book Resources before that site became terrible (after I stopped writing for them, of course).

Cut to a few years later and I’m working at Wizard officially. After years of trying to ignore the internet — and never really knowing how to handle it — the company put my pal Jim Gibbons in charge and things were rolling along. They were looking for original (and free) content from those of us who worked in the office and I decided to give it another shot. I remember walking to New York Comic Con one day with Jim and he asked what I’d want to blog about and I probably said “everything.” He encouraged me to narrow it down and after a bit of thought I remembered my old TGC column and pitched an entire blog around Kickin’ It Old School, a look at the pop culture of the past.

I know I didn’t kick of the nostalgia boom by any means, but this was well before all of those awesome Twitter and Instagram accounts I follow that post commercials and pics from the 80s and 90s. At the time, I figured that the Wizard site mostly covered the new, so this look at the old might be cool. I honestly can’t remember if anyone read it — after TGC I learned to NEVER read the comments when it comes to work — but I liked it. When I started realizing that Wizard was not long for this Earth, I took the time — on works hours — to copy all of my content and paste it into a Blogger account. I’m glad I did because that site is long gone, but you can read those posts here, though I don’t know if I can full-throatedly recommend that. I was so young and dumb back then!

Since then my interest in blogging has ebbed and flowed. There have been times where I’ve worked within a schedule, posting something every weekday. And then other times I go years without posting. I’ve tried keeping everything in one place and expanded to doing three or four blogs at a time. During my fallow periods I’ve started a few podcasts including the absolutely mad Dastardly Double Features (in which I played myself and the Cryptkeeper-esque Mr. Dastardly), The Midnight Comic Club and, most recently, The High Five Podcast. I enjoy the format of podcasting and will definitely return at some point, but I think it’s better with a partner or group than solo, so let me know if you’re interested.

And yet I still read, watch and listen to all of this great stuff that I want to tell people about. It’s not that I think I’m some kind of critical genius, far from it, but I do think that there must be people out there with similar tastes. I’ve been lucky to find some of those people both in real life and on these here interwebs and hope that maybe I can be that for someone else.

I’ll also say that, as someone who’s memory isn’t always the most reliable, I enjoy having this as a kind of external hard drive. Sometimes, I laugh because I’ll take the same note in 2023 that I also wrote back in 2009. On the other hand, it’s nice to see how my tastes have changed over the years. Even I was surprised to discover that I was lukewarm on Popcorn the first time I saw it, though now it’s a bigtime favorite. Go figure!

So, why not start blogging again? I realized that I didn’t really have a great reason not to. Back in the day, I had to stop because the kids were young and work was crazy, but now they’re gone most of the day at school and work is…well, being a freelancer is not as glamorous it might seem. With that, I guess I’m blogging again. I’ve got some interesting projects in the works that I’m excited to share with you. I’ve randomized my movie-watching to some extent. I’m also reading through every Superman appearance from the time after he returned from the dead up through an overhaul in 1999. And then there’s all of the other stuff I come across.

I don’t stick to the Kickin’ It Old School parameters and haven’t for over a decade. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the eclectic nature of this blog. I sure do. Oh and I also hope you enjoy the new look. I’m still getting used to it, but I’m enjoying the image-forward, cleaner look!