According To Me

Last week I had the honor of speaking at the 14,000-member New Life Church here in Colorado Springs (yes, *that* New Life Church), where I prayed for the media (well, for everybody except Lou Dobbs) while explaining my limited role in it. Which, of course, made me realize just how long I’ve been gone from this site and this blog. I could explain where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but, of course, then I’d have to kill you. Let it suffice to say I’ve been far busier than I can adequately explain, which doesn’t much make up for the fact I’ve been AWOL from many people in my life whom I dearly love. I don’t want to start naming names because I’m sure to leave somebody out, so I’ll just say I really do miss you all, and now that I’ve finally found a few days to clean up my house (both the one I sleep in and my virtual house here on the web), I’m going to take another stab at showing up around here more often and (gasp) actually answering my email.

Speaking of which, I kind of have upstairs email and downstairs email. All the comics-related and business stuff is downstairs email, and I haven’t booted up that PC in many, many months. So, again, I apologize to folks who’ve been trying to email me. All the more so since this weekend’s coma awakening found me switching the site to a shiny new hosting company. They are, like, 25% cheaper than my old company and provide, no kidding, like 10x the space and bandwidth. I’ve been using them for about a year over on the PraiseNet, so I’ve decided to move the less-praiseful Digital-Priest thing over as well.

Which means expect glitches and things moved as I’ve changed some directories and updated some other things. This week, I’m hoping, will be reasonably slow, which should allow me to get my lawn cut (my neighbors are forming a lynch mob) and to get into the Movable Type code, which I’m sure I screwed up. It seems to be working from my end, but enough of you have complained to inform me that something is probably wrong. I think my ultimate goal is to simply fork over the bucks and let them, Movable Type, get in and fix my installations and trouble-shoot my templates. Honestly, a programmer I am not.

The other unfortunate consequence of switching servers is I forgot to pull the mail off of the old one. I’m going to try and go in and grab it, but, to be safe, if you’ve emailed me in, gee, the last four to six months (man, that’s embarrassing) and got snubbed, I apologize. As I said, I have a bevy of good reasons (no, I wasn’t in jail. Yes, I was very sick for awhile, but me all better now). You can go ahead and re-send those messages, I’m doing both the upstairs and downstairs now and trying to streamline the whole email matter.

Circ wrote:
"Comics are in a mostly sorry state, I welcome your scribbles."

This is the second or third time I've heard this. Browsing around the shops, there an ENORMOUS amount of product out there. How can this be true? Browsing the covers, at least, it looks like Excitement City. I'm recognizing fewer and fewer of the names, but, from a cursory glance, it looks like comics are back and going strong.

My whining on ComicBookResources said:
"...comics are extremely personality-driven, and around the time I bowed out—burnt out, to be more accurate—the deal seemed to be that only guys with TV deals were being actively courted, which made not much sense to me and seemed fairly insulting. With all due respect to the TV writers, comic books are a profession. We’re professionals who worked hard to develop our craft, and many of us are being swept aside because Joe WordProcessor sold a pilot to The CW. I’d go to comics shops and just get angry, and I didn’t like feeling that way."

So my industry observations remain few and far between. But, to me, this seems like The Great Experiment: replacing veteran comic writers with TV guys. An urban legend circulating tells the story of how an old school writer (older than my school) called one of the top editors at one of the majors asking what was available. This guy is a major name who had, himself, held a senior position at one or both of the majors. He was always a friend to freelancers, and had been friendly to this now-major editor who'd been a shipping clerk when this old school writer was a boss at the company.

But the guy isn't a shipping clerk, he's a boss, now, and he told the old school writer, "Well, gee, I'm sorry. I'm just used to working with higher-profile talent."