FEBRUARY 2025

Happy belated New Year, everyone! Today is the first day of the rest of this blog's life. I'm still trying to figure out the new format, but at present I think I'm going to go with sort of an "Items of Interest" approach with little mini-headlines. For example...

A BOLD NEW ERA CALLS FOR A BOLD NEW BANNER!
Which is what I'm working on my spare time at the moment. I've been using those ol' John Byrne corner box heads from the late seventies/early eighties for quite a few years now, but I feel like it's time to retire them and sort of... personalize things a bit more. See, I don't talk about it all that much around here, but I like to draw. And so I figured maybe the banner should reflect that. To that end, I'm doing brand-new corner box heads in my own style, which will adorn the new banner once they're finished. Here's a sneak peek at the penciled versions of some of them:

(You'll note that I've started with the "unafilliated" characters and the Fantastic Four plus FF-adjacent characters. But there are more coming! I'm working on the Avengers right now.)

Now when I say "my style," I should clarify what I mean. I generally draw more cartoony than this, but I want to keep with the general aesthetic I've had here since the beginning. So cartoony is out, at least for this project, as I utilize my seldom-employed "super-hero" style -- which looks vastly different from my "everyday" drawings, and which takes about three times longer to boot! You may be able to tell that I'm obviously heavily influenced by Byrne (as well as some of my other favorites; Alan Davis and Mark Bagley top of the list), so ultimately what you see up top will not look all that drastically different from what you're used to. The main difference will be that I drew it myself!

But the other difference is that I'm changing up some of the looks and characters you'll see up there. I thought, after so long with the Bronze Age dominating the banner, that perhaps it's time I presented this blog adorned with the stars of "my" Marvel -- which is sort of a mix of eras. So you'll see the X-Men of the nineties, Avengers of various eras, some characters (chiefly Power Man, Iron Fist, and Moon Knight) who had their heydays in the seventies and early eighties, and some characters very much of the period when I read Marvel religiously in my teens, such as the Scarlet Spider, "Professor" Hulk, and the Thunderbolts. It'll be eclectic, but I think it will nicely represent my ideal or "iconic" Marvel Universe. I'll go into more detail when the banner is finished and published.

In other news...

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING LATELY?
This site was always, first and foremost, about examining comics, graphic novels, and the like. And just because I've decided to retire from writing long-term in-depth posts about same, doesn't mean that I've stopped reading them! So as I put up these monthly-ish posts, I'm going to try to mention things I've read lately. We'll start with a tome I finished a while back: FLASH GORDON VOLUME 4: THE STORM QUEEN OF VALKIR from Titan Books. This installment picks up where my Flash Gordon review of a number of years past ended. Creator Alex Raymond has left the strip, turning artistic duties over to his former assistant, Austin Briggs. Scripter Don Moore remains aboard.

This was an odd one. For those who read along with my Flash posts way back when, you might recall that when Raymond departed, all seemed well for our hero and his friends. Ming the Merciless had been vanquished some time earlier, and more recently, Flash had also defeated a new warlord named Brazor to restore peace yet again to Mongo. Thus the next volume, which collects all of Briggs' run on the Sunday strips, begins with a bit of a clean slate, and an odd status quo -- Flash is the president of Mongo.

You may be wondering, isn't there someone more qualified to be president, like maybe Prince Barin and/or his wife, the reformed daughter of Ming, Princess Aura? When we last saw them, they were indeed leading a council that ruled over Mongo following Ming's overthrow. But Barin and Aura are nowhere to be seen in these stories. At all. They were regular recurring cast members for years while Raymond was on the strip. True, they'd drop out of sight for (sometimes very long) stretches at at a time while Flash went off his various expeditions, but they always came back. Yet here, in a run of four years, we never see or even hear of them once. It's bizarre, especially considering the original scripter is still on board!

So instead we have President Flash ruling Mongo and battling the latest warlord to challenge the peace: this time, it's Ming's heretofore unknown son, Kang the Cruel. Kang is the regular antagonist through Briggs' full run, though there are many stories interspersed between his run-ins with Flash. Stories in which Flash and Dale find themselves in strange lands, where strange princesses fall immediately in love with the dashing Flash. I guess even with a new artist, some things never change!

In the end, Flash defeats Kang and once again restores peace to Mongo, and continues on as president. Oh, and Professor Zarkov, as always, drops in and out of the story, frequently disappearing just long enough that you think the creators might have forgotten his existence, until suddenly reappearing.

Like I said, it's kind of odd, and it's just a long rehash; four more years repeating everything Alex Raymond did during his decade on the strip. I get that newspaper strips were disposable entertainment; you read your daily paper and threw it away, and I get that there would always be new readers who might have missed all this stuff the first time around. And further, I get that Raymond's run was a full ten years long, and Moore's is four or so. But nonetheless, the blatant reptition is kind of crazy! You'd think they'd at least try to do something different now and then.

ANYTHING ELSE?
For now, I don't think so. I'm easing into the new format here, so I'm going to keep this post fairly brief. (This was brief?!) Next month, I think I'll have more to talk about, so I hope you'll join me!

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO MY FINAL POST...

...I couldn't pull it together! I started writing it, more than once. I had the thoughts in my head, but I couldn't get them out in a coherent fashion. I think partly it was simply because I didn't want to admit to myself that I was bringing this thing to an end. But also, I think on some level it was because I really and truly wasn't ready to stop. Like I said last month, I still have the desire and interest to do this. It's just been hard to find the will to do it.

Which got me thinking: maybe it's not that I'm burnt out on blogging. I absolutely still want to blog. Maybe I'm just burnt out on the grind of writing about long runs, one issue at a time. In fact, I think I'm burnt out on writing about short runs too, in the more freewheeling format I have employed on occasion for mini-series, one shots, etc.

So maybe what I really need is not to retire from blogging entirely, but rather to change my format and schedule. To that end, I've been thinking. When I first started this site, it was absolutely primarily intended to discuss comic books. But there was also other stuff. Occasional posts about Marvel movies or various TV shows or even once or twice, a novel. All that stuff fell by the wayside pretty quickly as I decided to focus entirely on comics, but it was there originally.

So now I'm thinking that maybe I get back to posting about whatever. An occasional comic, something I've watched, something else I've read, and so forth. And on a less demanding schedule than once a week. Right now, I'm imagining something like once a month or every few weeks. Heck, I don't even think the schedule would be set in stone. The posts would likely be longer, and in more of a "catch-all" vein -- rather than each post being about a single subject, it would be a number of things on my mind at that particular moment.

Now -- I think (or perhaps I should say that I know) a lot of people came here for the comic book stuff. After all, that was, as I said, this site's ultimate raison d'etre once I settled into my groove. So to those who aren't interested in sticking around to see where we go from here, I understand completely. But if you've come to like my writing over these past twelve or so years, then I hope you'll at least stick around to give the new format a chance.

And to be sure, there will always be comic book (or comic book adjacent) content here. Just not the way it used to be. So let's give it a try, shall we? A bold new era for "Not A Hoax" begins next week, and I hope you'll join me for it!