While I don't want this blog to end up as a mish-mash of everything creative/writing that I do, it looks very much like it's heading that way...
I have plans to continue the writing challenge that I previously abandoned after only one week. Also, I have a few ideas running around in my head for a webcomic. I heard somewhere that producing a webcomic and keeping up to date with it is a very good way to build up an online presence and show that you can stick to a schedule... Yup, because I've been great at sticking to a schedule on the blog so far...
As well as this, I've scanned in a few of the drawings that I planned on sharing through this blog, just to air a few of my pieces of 'art' (as it's so average that I very much hesitate to call it 'art'). The plan is to post these bit by bit, so as to keep a bit of a regular content update going. Planning ahead is not exactly one of my strong suits, so this is a fairly big thing for me...
Anyway, I digress.
The point of this particular blog post is to talk about my latest purchase - an Amazon Kindle Fire, which, in itself, needs some explaining.
I recently went down to London for a few months for an intern position at Titan Comics, as I though this would very well supplement my career goal of becoming a writer for comics... The position, however, was in the Advertising and Marketing side of things. This wasn't exactly my ideal destination in the industry. But it was, nonetheless, in the industry.
The three months passed in a flash, and I had loads of fun working there, learned a lot about marketing and the production process of comics, and met loads of great people. It was definitely an experience I very much needed to have, and I now feel a LOT more confident about my plan to get into the industry.
I was even offered the chance to stay on a while longer as an unpaid intern, but alas, my monetary and University work restraints forced me to decline.
(p.s. If anyone from Titan happens to read this, which I very much doubt, thanks for the opportunity! And also apologies for any instances in which I was a weirdo in the office...)
Okay so life exposition aside, while I was down in London for said opportunity, I also found myself with another opportunity... The accessibility of many, many comics.
London, you see, is home to a particular shop - Forbidden Planet. I'd previously visited here, in order to scope out its comic potential, and found it to be very, very adequate in this regard. (This, was, however, before I had any inkling that I would get the chance to work at its affiliate company, Titan).
I began reading comics when I was very young, mostly in the Beano, and occasionally the Dandy when I was feeling traitorous to Beanotown. (The mock rivalry between those two publications was insane back in the day!) So I've always had an inclination towards the medium as a form of narrative expression.
As I grew up (blimey this blog post is turning into an epic) I turned away from the 'childish' comic books and started to read more 'grown up' prose books. This misconception of comics brought on by society, I think, was a detriment to my life growing up. However, if I hadn't stopped reading them, I never would have been able to re-introduce myself to them.
Also worth a mention is that Webcomics were a big part of my teenage years. But I never saw these as having any narrative significance, they were just there for laughs, for something to read, kept to the side in a browser tab while I did my homework, or rather, while I was procrastinating. I started off reading funnies such as Ctrl-Alt-Del, Looking for Group and VG Cats. It was only later that I started to read comics that had what could be described as a continuing plot or sub-plot, things like Dr. McNinja and Questionable Content.
I started reading comics again in a way that I think a lot of people begin to read comics nowadays - through film. Some of the first, more 'grown-up' comics that I read were titles that had been adapted into the audio-visual form of film or television, or were, in turn, adaptations or spin-offs of those things. This included comics like Kick-Ass, Watchmen and V for Vendetta (I was a big Moore fan back then), because of the more mature topics covered by these films, I was convinced that the comics they were based on would also be just as mature, and I wasn't wrong.
While these titles were what brought me back into the comics universe, they definitely were not where I stopped. I started reading more titles related to other things that I was interested in. Dark Horse's Mass Effect series of comics, for example, based on the game series of the same name, were a big part of my comic readership as a re-entered the world of comics. As well as this, comic adaptations of books by some of my favourite authors, such as Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.
This eventually branched out into what I saw as the more 'pulpy' comic books - Marvel, DC etc. I started out reading titles related to the films that had been released, and cartoons I had watched as a kid, stuff like X-men, Batman, Spider-Man, and some of the big crossover events like Secret Invasion, Civil War and Siege. Even some stuff that was upcoming as a film, but I was sure would be good, like Guardians of the Galaxy, which I promptly fell in love with as a comic series.
But reading comics is a slippery slope, or, to use another metaphor, a swimming pool. One can toe the water, never really submerging themselves. Or, one can dive straight in, or be pushed, or dive in after toeing the water... There's lots of possibilities. My point is, often, with Marvel or DC stuff, there is LOTS of continuity and cross-over. If you read one title, you can be sure that title will eventually feature a character from another series, or mention events that happened in previous issues, or another series entirely. So what do you do? In my case, I started reading those other series and story-lines. Soon, my shelves filled with TPBs and my wallet drained of cash...
One important note is that I always bought the collected edition of the comics, the paperback versions, as I believed this was a more organised way of reading them, and also... slightly cheaper. I never made the leap to buying individual issues. Mostly due to the lack of any decent comic book shops in my local area. The town in which I live doesn't even have a McDonalds, or a Costa, let alone a nice little independent comic book shop...
My tastes in comic reading didn't stop there, though, ohhhh no. Sometime in my university education I began to realise that there was a vast wealth of comics to be read, beyond even the massive multiverses of Marvel and DC. That there were more publishers, places like Image, IDW, Dark Horse, Titan and more. I also realised that my comic reading didn't have to be constrained to stuff that I knew about, that I had read or watched or played before, no, there were stories that existed only as comics, that weren't connected to any world that anything else I'd read were a part of.
So I began to branch out, looking for stuff that had been highly rated, things like Saga, Black Science, The Wicked + The Divine, Sex Criminals. I re-read Dr. McNinja in its Dark Horse published entirety. I became a comics omnivore.
Which brings me back to Forbidden Planet. This treasure trove, this veritable cornucopia of comics was, and is, paradise to me, as wide and diverse as my comic interests are.
I attempted to stop myself from delving into the individual issue side of things, but the temptation of catching up to the current issue of comics that I'd been waiting months for the latest volume of was too much. I threw myself into catching up with these comics, and I threw myself hard.
I caught up on all my favourite Marvel series, including post-Secret Wars comics that were taking a long time to come out in tpb form. I started reading even more new comics, now that I could read a single issue to see if it was worth reading or not. And then I discovered comics Wednesday, the single greatest attack on my wallet to ever occur. I looked up which comics were coming out each week, and made a list in advance of which I would be purchasing.
Getting the tube the few stops from working at Titan to FP became a regular occurrence, at least every Wednesday. These new comics I bought from there were on top of all the comics available to me through work, their Doctor Who titles, Assassin's Creed, and more... I found myself over-encumbered with comics. Eventually, my Titan days were over (all too soon) and I had to go back up north to finish off my degree (which I'm still in the progress of).
I managed to take all the paperback collected version comics back with me to Lincolnshire, but unfortunately, I had to leave all the individual issue comics with the family I'd been staying with in London, and there they remain. Fortunately, Marvel does this neat thing where each comic they produce contains a code for a free digital copy. So I quickly redeemed all of those on their website before returning.
These digital copies, could, I learned, be linked up to Comixology and read on phones or tablets which supported the app. Unfortunately for me, the reader on the website was clunky and slow, my Windows phone did not support the app and the only other thing that could read them was my Kindle, which only supported black and white display...
I had all of these comics at my disposal, and no way to read them. Which was, eventually, what lead me to purchase my new Kindle Fire, the intended topic of this blog post. Oops.
Guess I'll talk about it next time! Cheerio folks.
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