What's This? A New Blog Post?!?

As you probably know, the Kleefeld on Comics blog has been on hiatus since March of last year. I originally put the blog on hold to give me some time to work on my webcomics textbook manuscript. Interestingly, only a couple weeks after putting things on hold here, though, I was hit by a car and found myself in the hospital for several weeks, with another couple months wheelchair-bound after that. So all of my other projects -- literally everything I was working on -- came to a screeching halt. When I had recovered enough to start getting back to working on anything, I was woefully behind on... well, pretty much everything. The physical therapy for the rehab I needed obviously took up a good chunk of time, too, and it's only been the last month or two that I've felt I'm starting to get caught up. So between that and wanting to start reminding people that I'm still around before my book comes out next year, I thought it would be a good time to get back to blogging.

I've already managed to mention my upcoming book twice in the first paragraph, so let me get some of that info out of the way. Bloomsbury has a Comics Studies series of textbooks focusing on different types of comics. Mine will be the fourth in the series and examines the broad spectrum of what we call webcomics. The handful of books about webcomics so far have primarily been how-to focused, with one looking at webcomics' history up through its 2006 publication. This one does include some history, but it's more of an analysis of the whole medium: the technology, the financing, the creative styles... what makes webcomics different and unique from printed comics?

Here's what Tom Spurgeon has to say about it...

I've always been a great fan of Sean Kleefeld's writing: its clarity, its circumspection, and the measured quality of his tone. Kleefeld is an ideal writer to chronicle the rise of modern webcomics. He patiently explores not just the nascent realities of an industry in flux but all of the roads not taken, all of the false starts and dead ends, with the perspicacity an unformed future demands. In Kleefeld's hands, defining what comics looks like today is less a sorting out process for the ages than a mad crash down a steep hill hoping to scoop up some village's bouncing wheel of cheese set loose on the valley below. By the time you're through, you'll know just what set of circumstances won the day, and what set didn't and what might be yet to come. The longer you take to find and read your own copy is the amount of time I get to be smarter than you.

(As a brief aside, I saw the above quote and wrote this literally less than an hour before learning of Tom's passing. I'll post something more substantial about him tomorrow.)

The book is getting prepped for the printer now, and it should be available in June 2020. You can pre-order a copy now on Amazon or through Bloomsbury's site.

Clearly, I'm going to be trying to encourage people to buy a copy (or two!) over the next several months. But part of what makes for good marketing is just getting my name out there. I've been largely out of the comics-writing circuit for almost two years now, and I need to remind folks that I actually know a thing or two about comics. So I'm going to try to return to my daily blogging and see if I can catch some folks' attention with something clever here. The RSS feed is still available for those who still use them, and I'll try cross-posting on social media if you follow me there.

In the meantime, you can check out the Patreon I still have up and running. I've actually been serializing an early draft version of my webcomics book there, and if you scroll back to 2018 or earlier, you can find archives of some of what I had written for MTV Geek and is no longer readily available elsewhere.

I'm looking forward to getting back into more regular (and public!) writing about comics. I know blogging went out of fashion a while back, but I hope you'll join me anyway for whatever insights I can come up with about our favorite medium!

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