Special needs

This post by Curt at The Groovy Age of Horror strongly arguing for specialist rather than generalist horrorblogs got me thinking about the other pop-culture blogosphere with which I’m most familiar (and the formation of which I like to pretend I had a hand in as well), the comics blogosphere. Regarding the horror one, Curt says:

A good core concept should be broad enough that you have lots of stuff to post about, but tight enough to define and individualize your blog. “Horror” is way too generic and amorphous. If there’s one thing the emerging horror blogosphere doesn’t need, it’s a bunch of “horror” blogs. That’s not the kind of horror blogosphere I want to see develop.

This philosophy has certainly worked well for Curt, who’s pretty much cornered the market on horror kitsch/trash/exotica from the bell-bottom era. But in terms of the comics blogosphere, we haven’t really seen a lot of this. I’m sure there are dozens of comics blogs that talk only about Big Two supercomics, but since I’m usually not interested in hearing from people for whom that is their sole point of comic-book reference, I don’t read them. There are some mostly-manga/anime blogs, there’s Egon (all art/alt/underground, all the time, to the exclusion even of the likes of smarter supercreators like Grant Morrison or Alan Moore), there’s NeilAlien (in theory a Dr. Strange fan/news site, in practice one of the best general comicsblogs around), and I suppose you could classify Fanboy Rampage as a specialist blog if comics-fan and comics-creator stupidity is a specialty; but for the most part the comics blogs that I like the best, and also the comics blogs that seem to have moved the blogosphere furthest forward, are generalist blogs. Some, like Tom Spurgeon’s unbeatable Comics Reporter and Dirk Deppey’s seminal