If you can remember when the comics blogosphere consisted of about dozen people, this will come as a blow: David Allen “Johnny Bacardi” Jones has decided to close down his long-running (five years!) blog. Johnny had a well-defined, intelligent viewpoint about comics and he intelligently articulated it for a long, long time. I’ll miss him, especially now that I’m getting back involved in comicsblogging. Fortunately he’ll still be keeping up Elton John blog, where he’s writing about every song in John’s 1966-1979 catalog one post at a time, which is the kind of fabulous idea only good bloggers would come up with in the first place.
Johnny’s departure, hinging as it does on his impression that blogospheric tastemakers had him on the pay-no-mind list, also brings up the kind of “why blog? and for whom?” issues that are worth airing from time to time. I can tell you that getting away from comicsblogging and shifting gears to horror was probably a great thing for me to do. The horror blogosphere isn’t nearly as concerned with industry punditry or advocacy as the comics blogosphere is; for one thing, in horror media like film, television, and prose, the lines of demarcation between fan, critic, and creator are a lot firmer than they are in the still comparatively romper-room industry of comics, so you’re operating at a remove from the business end of things and therefore feel like you have less clout, so who cares? It’s just people talking. There also tends to be less snark involved–I don’t know what it is about funnybooks that makes people come out swinging, but I noticed that my own dick-o-meter started edging up the second I started blogging about comics again a few weeks ago and it takes some doing to force it back down. All this makes horrorblogging an enterprise that feels much less dependent on the approval or opprobrium of others for its survival, which is a feeling that carries back over into other kinds of blogging you do, which is why I’d keep this thing up regardless of how much feedback I got or didn’t get.
Anyway. Go tell Johnny goodbye. Goodbye Johnny!