A Decade-plus of Comics Journalism Frustration

I stumbled across this post of mine from 2007 in which I complain about the state of comic news. Namely, that I was making a few active attempt to follow as much as I could and I still missed even the basic announcements about some book releases. I've been noodling the idea again recently because I saw that Ryan Estrada posted a short video last week in which he and his wife are unboxing their latest book... which I hadn't even heard about yet.

He followed that up the other day with an entire song that he and a friend had written for the book!

I double checked many of the "usual suspects" when it comes to comics news and found nothing about the book at all. (As a curious aside, many of the specific references in my 2007 piece feel incredibly dated. Wizard Magazine ended in 2011, Newsarama is technically still around but has been a shell of its of former self for at least a decade, Jen Contino stopped writing for Sequential Tart five years ago after two decades -- I don't know what she's doing now. Amazon had back then recently started their "You Might Also Like" feature which was nacent enough to be lousy, but it got better only to have since gotten much worse. Google Alerts is supposedly still a thing, but I haven't seen/heard of anyone who's found it functionally useful for a decade.) I had a come to the conclusion some years back that my best option was to follow creators I was interested in directly on social media as there was by no means any guarantee that any 'normal' comics news outlets would have any coverage of what I'm personally interested in. That's proved challenging, however, since I dropped Facebook and Twitter (before it was rebranded as X), both of which started serving up more garbage than useful/interesting creator updates anyway.

I'm opting to pass on BlueSky since everything I've heard paints it as having all the same problems Twitter had before I left. I can't stand the TikTok and Instagram formats. I follow a few comics people on LinkedIn, but that's hardly a mecca of creator content. I'm on Mastodon, which also isn't used very heavily by the comics community. As you can see, I've gotten some updates from creators on YouTube, although based on the trends I've seen in what they've been serving up over the past six months or so, I expect I'll be presented with more garbage than anything useful within the next year. I'm seeing more creators get back to email newsletters and re-adding RSS feeds to their own sites; I'm hoping those trends continue before we get to the point where social media becomes useless to me.

Logically, I get why all this is happening, and the basic challenge of being a creator and trying to get the word out about your next/current project in an absolute avalanche of information and announcements. It's all indicative of larger problems with news and communication more broadly and, as I've already suggested, a problem that I know I've certainly been wrestling with for several years now. And because I've been wrestling with it for so long already and haven't resolved it since the landscape has been constantly shifting, I don't expect to resolve it any time soon either.

I suppose my point here -- besides just taking some time to vent -- is to suggest that you keep an active eye/ear out for comics news beyond a handful of websites, and that you continue to search for news, that you don't assume it'll be served up to you through your favorite outlet. It is indeed more work on your part, but you get -- for my money -- better, more satisfying results. Because I can guarantee you right now that reading about a single night without a curfew in Korea is going to be more interesting to me than whatever it is the Justice League are doing.

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