END OF DAYS

This blog is about to get a lot nerdier.

Since the summer of 2004 I've been freelancing for City Weekly. I've done a few things for them like album reviews, band profiles, comedy writing and event previews but what I mostly did was write about comic books. For a long time it was a steady rotation of once a month, just like clockwork. At first it was strictly reviews and usually went like this - one 450 word piece and two 100 word capsules. Mostly I tried to review comics that I really liked and thought more people should be reading. I never liked reviewing shitty comics because to me, the point was to get as many people reading comics as I could. So that meant highlighting all the good stuff that was out there and I thought I did a pretty good job of that.

One of my favorite stories about this was, one week after I had written a review of the awesome NORTHLANDERS by Brian Wood (which just got cancelled and inspired another post to come) my friend Josh was at the comic shop talking to the owner. The door opened and this guy that looked like he didn't read comics came walking in holding something in his hand. He held it up and it was a copy of my review, ripped out of the City Weekly and just said "I want this book."

Hearing things like that made me happy. There's been a few other times I've gone in to the comic shop and the owner would tell me that something I wrote was selling a lot of books and it would make me feel good.

Once the rotation of my column started getting more and more irregular, I started branching out a bit more and writing pieces that were more essays than reviews. I'd pick something that was going on in the industry and write about it for a bit. It was fun, but since I never had a clear idea of when I was going to get to write, I decided to steer clear of posting comic related stuff on trevorhale.com just in case.

But last week I got an e-mail from the A&E editor, the guy who's essentially been my boss for the past 7 years telling me they'd signed a deal with Big Shiny Robot to take over the Geek Culture aspect of the paper which included comics.

I was a little bit bummed, but not shocked. Bryan Young, one of the founding editors of the site has been working hard for a long time building that site in to what it is today and he's done an awesome job of it. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of some of the writing on the site, but I do respect the guys, what they do and how hard they've worked at it.

I'll still be freelancing from time to time for City Weekly, but that also means that this site is going to have a lot more comic related stuff on it now.

Just a fair warning.