My 2006 Year In Review

Well, it's only a few days from 2007 and it seems mandatory that I look back on the previous 360-odd days and reflect on what's happened. Honestly, I'm usually not to keen to look back on a whole year like this but, as I said, it seems mandatory. Most of the links here send you to one of my blog entries about the topic.

Let me get some of the negative stuff out of the way first. The comic industry has lost several talents this year, among them Seth Fisher, Alex Toth, Ernie Schroder, Marty Nodell, Dave Cockrum, Jerry Bails and my pal Gregg Allinson. Claypool announced that they will be ceasing publication of their entire comics line. Dan Slott's excellent The Thing series was cancelled prematurely.

Marvel began their company-wide "Civil War" and DC launched it's weekly 52 series. DC also initiated a mini-reboot with their "One Year Later" idea. The industry had a successful Free Comic Book Day, the fourth in as many years.

In non-comics media, we saw Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, a new Fantastic Four cartoon, Superman Returns, Heroes, Hollywoodland, a Legion of Super Heroes cartoon, and Krrish. We saw extended reporting of the San Diego con live on national television for the first time. We saw Marvel EIC Joe Quesada being asked to appear on one of the most popular shows currently on cable (The Colbert Report). I've also heard several comic creators on NPR, including Stan Lee, Frank Miller, Joe Quesada, Paul Jenkins, James Boyle, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.

Online, we have the creation of Wowio and Pullbox Online to legally download comic books. ComicSpace.com launched, with wild success thus far, to try to help unite comic book fans across the globe. Although created in the latter part of 2005, ComicBookDB.com has grown enormously in 2006 and seems to me to be the best way of cataloging your collection of comics. Oh, and I began this very blog back in February!

Getting more personal, I was exposed to and read many more non-maintsream books than ever before. There's certainly serial titles like Oz-Wonderland Chronicles and Local but also original graphic novels like American Born Chinese, Five Fists of Science and Blankets. Somewhat related, I've also dropped a number of Marvel titles in the realization that I just don't enjoy them. I've bought more comics that I genuinely enjoy this year than I think I ever have in the past. I've also become more published with several JKC articles as well as some work for the 10th FF Masterworks. Plus an incosequential cameo within the Marvel Universe. ;)

Despite some personal set-backs, 2006 was a good year in comics for me. I wouldn't say great (largely because of those personal set-backs) but I think I've ended the year on an up-note. I'm not one to set long-term goals for myself; I tend to just try to keep moving forward and wind up at the end of the year further along than I was at the beginnning. By that measure, I'm relatively pleased.

I'm glad I've gone through the exercise of reviewing 2006. Looking at the long-term has put some perspective on some of the more recent garbage I've seen/dealt with in comics, and it's refreshing to see that, despite said garbage, I'm still making some sort of vague, intangible headway in the larger scheme of things.

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