On Business: Self-Promotion

One of the things I am not good at is self-promotion. I generally just try to put my head down and do decent work. I think it's an outgrowth of the work ethic instilled in me by my parents: that life is a meritocracy and the best will always naturally rise to the top. I've had more than a few professional... let's call them incidents where that was pretty roundly disproven, but I haven't yet really got the hang of playing politics or networking or self-promotion. My good work has gone completely unignored, fortunately, but I do very occasionally wonder where my career would've taken me by now if I'd have played the game differently.

Anyway, since I don't generally do a good job of self-promotion, I'm going to take some time today for some...

ITEM!
I have written and published two books, and am currently working on my third. My first book was Comic Book Fanthropology, which looks at who and what comic fans are. There's a bit of history in there, but I think it provides a good understanding of why fans act the way they do. In light of some of the crap in comicdom that happened last week, I think many people would find it very insightful. (I know I continually refer back to it mentally all the time!) It's available through Lulu in a variety of formats or in paperback via Amazon.

My second book is Edward Lear & the Snargetted Flartlethants of Nonsense. It contains an examination of nonsense poetry, a biography of Edward Lear, and a reproduction of Lear's illustrated Book of Nonsense. This is only available in paperback via Lulu.

ITEM!
I'm a long-standing contributor to a variety of TwoMorrows magazines, most notably The Jack Kirby Collector. I've been in every issue since #40 back in 2004! Issue #64 came out recently in which I discuss Jack's script for an unproduced film he called The Frog Prince. Issue #65 should come out in late May/early June. There is always a boatload of great content in every issue, and I have long been thrilled to have my name attached to it in any way. There are previews of, I think, just about every issue on the TwoMorrows site, and many of them have at least one page of my work.

ITEM!
I've been a contributor/partner to the relatively new comics/pop culture news site, FreakSugar.com. I've got two columns over there, one on fans and fandom generally (not just of comics!) and one on webcomics. Plus, I do an occasional book review or interview or something. There's also some really good work there by the other contributors, and I think we'll have some big announcements in the coming months, so stay tuned for that!

ITEM!
I'm going to limit my plugs today to four, so this is the last one! I mentioned above that I'm working on a third book. It's going to cover the Blackstone comics of the 1940s. I had originally planned on just reprinting some of the public domain books with maybe a short introduction, but the more I learned about them, the more fascinating the story behind them became! Because Harry Blackstone and writer Walter Gibson had such illustrious careers outside of this work, it's rarely mentioned even in passing. The comics passed from Street & Smith to Vital to EC to Timely, and how everyone got involved is a strange and winding story in an of itself. I'm aiming to have this finished later this year, and I started a Patreon in part to help fund some of my research on it. If this sounds like an interesting book, or if you like my writing generally, I'd really appreciate any financial support you might be able to provide!

Thanks for taking the time to read my work, in whatever form(s) you find it! I really do appreciate that I have any platform at all to talk about comics, and hearing when someone recognizes my work means a great deal to me.

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