FORTRESS OF BAILEYTUDE

My podcasting partner in crime, Scott Gardner, has had to take a brief hiatus from the shows he hosts alone, with me and with Chris Honeywell.  I’m kind of bummed but I completely understand real life having to come first.  I’ve been in that position myself.  I didn’t really have time to put together a proper entry for today but I wanted to post a thing or two for Scott.  He’ll understand why.

At least I hope he will.

That’s it for now.  As usual…

More to follow…

All right.  Books have been cut.  Plans have been made.  Now it’s time to take a good long look at what I want to do with this blog.

I think it is fair to say that from the very beginning this blog has been all of the over place in terms of subject matter and format.  When I first set out with this endeavour it was a Superman blog.  All Superman, all the time and for a month or so that was great, especially since I was gearing up for the then upcoming trip to Metropolis.  After I got back the muse for writing about Superman left without so much as a “Dear John” letter.  It’s not that I lost my appreciation and “love” for the character.  Far from it.  I am still very much the Bibbo of Superman fandom.  He’s my fav’rit.  In fact I am devoting an entire episode of Views in about two weeks my feelings on the Man of Steel.  The thing is that I couldn’t find a grove for the thing.  I would make plans and try things and they never worked out so a few months ago I switched to an all comics, all the time format and things have worked out  a little better from there.

Over the last month or so the way I look at the comics I read and the way I look at comic fandom on the Internet in general have both gone through some major shifts.  I finally accepted that I am not on board with how the comic book industry has changed and that “my time” is over.  There are well written books with fantastic art out there, but those that I enjoy and get into are few and far between.  There was a time when what was coming out as a whole appealed to me.  Now it’s a pick and choose sort of situation.  Editorial mandate has shifted and I’m not feeling it.  There’s nothing wrong with this.  Absolutely nothing wrong with this.  I have come to the conclusion that the entertainment I choose to partake in does not have to bend to my will.  I can’t expect a company to tailor their product just for me.  Times change.  People change.  New generations come into the fray and want something to call their own.  It’s all good.

What this means is that I am not going to use this blog as an exercise in yelling at the rain anymore.  I read a fair number of blogs and they mainly break down into three categories; informational, character specific and opinion.  The informational blogs are entertaining and informative to one extent or another.  There is commentary, but it is specific to the subject at hand.  Collected Editions produces reviews for…collected editions but it also dispenses information on upcoming releases.  This blog strikes me as a place for people who dig on trades and hardcovers to come and read the thoughts of the people writing for the site and the agenda stops there.  Character specific blogs, such as my buddy Shag’s Firestorm Fan is all about Firestorm.  It is a place for fans of the nuclear one to come and check out pictures and scans related to that character.  There is commentary, but that’s not the point of the thing.  It’s a showcase for a fan’s burning desire to talk about their favorite comic book hero, villain or team.

Opinion blogs have become increasingly frustrating to me.  They really have.  I appreciate where the writers are coming from and applaud their desire to express their opinions and would defend their right to say even if I thought it was wrong on fifteen different levels.  The thing is that I have gotten to the point where I really don’t care about the industry as a whole so reading peoples’ thoughts on how it sucks and why it sucks is just not for me anymore.  Add to that the fact that people keep getting into pissing contests because one blog said something that they didn’t like so they rush to their blog and write about what a terrible thing Writer A said and why Writer A is wrong.  Honest to God I saw a pissing contest about what it means to be a feminist and a comic book fan.  I didn’t know feminists got into pissing contests.  It boggled my mind.  Any time a “sensitive” issue is discussed flame wars erupt and the point gets lost.  It’s not, “Hey, DC has a history of treating their female staff like crap,” it becomes, “Well, you can’t be a feminist and support DC.”  It goes from something that needs to be said to why a person doesn’t fit into a label.

It makes comic fandom on the Internet look like a reactionary, bi-polar, whiny lot and I really don’t want to be a part of that anymore.  Last month I hit the roof about Superman leaving Action Comics.  I feel really bad about that now because instead of sitting down, thinking it through and then crafting a response based in reason in logic  or just accepting that it was going to happen, there was nothing I could do about, it didn’t really matter and just move on with life I went in with guns blazing because I was mad.  I was mad about something that happened in a comic book.  In a “at the end of the day” kind of way that makes little to no sense.  The economy is in the toilet.  Jobs are hemorrhaging everyday.  People are losing their homes.  My insurance was restructured for the year and it’s costing me more money for medicine and such.  These things are important.  Superman leaving Action Comics is not, no matter how big a Superman fan I am.

So it breaks down like this; Fortress of Baileytude is going to be about my thoughts on comic books and comic book characters.  That’s pretty much it.  Issue profiles.  Character profiles.  Essays.  Personal thoughts.   The weekly dose of YouTube.  That sort of thing.  I’m not going to write about what Dan DiDio said on Newsarama yesterday.  I’m not going to complain that Spider-Man isn’t married anymore.  I’m not going to bitch about the fact that they are taking Superman out of his books…anymore.  If I write about a creator it will only be about their work, not about what they said on a message board.  Am I going to put on a pair of rose tinted glasses every time I sit down to craft a post?  Heck no.  If something sucks I am not going to try and pretty it up.  I’m just not going to sit here and snipe.  Sure there will be the occasional pithy comment because well, I’m me.  I can’t help it.  It just happens.  Frankly I blame my parents, but that’s all I blame them for.

Essentially I want to focus on the positive without ignoring the negative.  I want this blog to be fun.  I want people to come every Monday through Friday and find something interesting.  It might be three lines of my attempts at humor.  It might be doing an in-depth look at John Byrne’s Man of Steel.  It might be YouTube Tuesday.  It might be a Top Ten Reasons I Think Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men run is awesome.  The point is I read and collect comics because I enjoy them and because I want to be drawn into fictional universe as a means to be entertained, forget the world for awhile and at times to be engaged emotionally or philosophically.  It only makes sense that I would want the blog to reflect that.

It will be the same with Views From The Longbox.  No more complaining.  I’ll be more apt to rip a story apart on the podcast because, well, that’s comedy gold, but no more episodes about why DC sucks right now.

And that’s pretty much that.  This isn’t world shaking but it is important to me.  I hope y’all stick around and I hope that I will be entertaining enough to justify y’all sticking around.

More to follow…

Yesterday I wrote about my intentions to get my butt out of debt.  Here’s how I am going to do it or at least here is how I am going to start doing it.

Step 1: Cut back on the comics and such I buy now.  I went into this yesterday.  There’s no need in mentioning it again.  Keep a handful of titles and ignore everything else.  That will cut down the amount I spend considerably.

Step 2: Cut back on extravagances.

Hardly any eating out.  No new DVDs.  The odd theater going experience here and there.  Until this whole thing is in better shape it is not something we (my wife and I) need to do.  We’re cool with that.

Step 3: Sell a bunch of stuff.

Mostly comics and trades.  I currently own about 16,500 books.  If I sat down right now and started reading them all I am not sure I could finish that task by the time I…well…you know.  They are taking up space.  There are trades on my shelf that I may never read.  What in the hell am I doing with all of these action figures?

Well, that cuts to the heart of what got me into this mess in the first place.  I joke about my comic book collecting being an addiction but it is not that far off.  It’s not that I ever bought comics over paying for food or robbed my grandmother’s purse to get money for a fix, but I did spend irresponsibly.  Horrendously so.  I would give in to impulse buys on a near constant basis for a few years there.  “Ooh!  The Lords of the Ultra-Realm!  I remember reading about that group in the 1987 Who’s Who Update.  I just gots to have that!”  Replace Lords of the Ultra-Realm with any number of crap and non-crap books from the eighties and nineties and suddenly my comic book collection is huge, unwieldy and kind of scary when all laid out.  It’s like a bacteria, really.  They’re not good for me and spreads quickly unless treated.

I’ve been thinking about why I have such a large collection.  Something has changed within my psychological make-up over the past two or so years and I have been seriously questioning what made me want so many comic books.  I mentioned addiction, but that’s only part of it and kind of makes light of real, family crippling addiction.  I think it has more to do with the fact that for good or ill those comics gave me a sense of identity.  Looking at my teens and early twenties one of the things that people knew me for was that I was into comic books.  Superman mostly but comics in general.  In high school it separated me from my peer group because most of them couldn’t have cared less about the medium.  When I moved to Georgia I met most of my friends through comic shops and collecting.  Online I’ve made a good number of friendships because of comics and collecting.  Having a large collection somehow made me feel like a top dog.  Like I was king of the mountain.  “Oh, you’re into comics.  I am too.  Aren’t we awesome?  Look at the size of my collection?  Isn’t it marvelous?”

I look back on that and wonder what in the name of God was I thinking?

The thing is I still like reading and collecting comic books.  It makes me happy and if brought under control shouldn’t be a problem.  I don’t play sports.  I don’t have a Friday night poker game.  I don’t go to a bar every night and knock back a few with my peer group.  I need something to take my mind off the everyday grind of living and comics fit that bill.  I’m glad I have a podcast and friends with which to discuss old and new comics.  I don’t want that to change, but I certainly don’t need as many comics as I have.  I would rather have a smaller, more focused collection than a bunch of crap I may never read.

Same with trades.  They are cool, to be sure, but they are not my bread and butter.  I’d rather have a collection of trades for stuff that I enjoy reading than a bunch of books sitting on the shelf gathering dust that I will, supposedly get around to one day.

And action figures?  Oy!  Have I wasted money on action figures!  Here’s the deal with action figures; when you get to the point where you don’t have room to showcase them it’s time to stop.

You know, there is this odd sense of peace in selling off the majority of my collection.  It feels right and I think in the end it will be better for me financially as well as having piece of mind that I control my baser instincts.  I realize I am not going to make a fortune off of these books and comics and DVDs but I think it will make a dent in my debt.

Wow, I feel like I’m in therapy all of the the sudden.  Not that that’s a bad thing.

So what does this mean for this blog and my podcast?  Come back tomorrow to find out.

More to follow…

It is amazing how real life can kick you in the pants.

Time to get a little personal; my money situation…sucks. Sucks out loud. Sucks all day long. I kept telling myself that I could go on with only minor changes in my spending habits. This week I had to take a long, hard look at…well everything and needed to come up with a plan to deal with the situation as it stands as opposed to the fictional reality of how I want it to stand. It is time to get real. I am not penniless, but there are some things that need to be taken care of and taken care of now before I end up dealing with it for the rest of my life.

One of the sad fact of the matters is that I can’t buy comics the way I used to. I can’t collect back issues the way I used to. I can’t buy trades the way I used to. I can’t buy action figures at all, This is how it is. This is how it has to be. I can’t do it anymore. There are too many other obligations to take care of. The economy has changed. The way my insurance is structured has changed. For better or worse this is the way it has to be and surprisingly I am fine with it. I’m not the happiest of campers, but I’d rather be able to take care of all my responsibilities and not buy a bunch of comics I can’t afford than be miserable because of the situation I have gotten myself into.

So here is how it is going to work:

New comics; Superman titles and Amazing Spider-Man only. I review Amazing Spider-Man, Superman/Batman and Justice League of America on a weekly/monthly basis. I like doing this. I’ve made a good number of friends and acquired a good number of detractors this way. I worked the numbers on this and it equals roughly $25-$30 a month, maybe less. That’s not a whole lot. What this means is no more crossovers, dropping other titles I am currently buying and not starting anything new. The whole Dark Reign bandwagon I wanted to jump on? Can’t do it. The only reasons I am keeping the Superman books is that I have been reading and collecting those since 1987. They’re hard to drop and it’s not all that much money really.

Back issues; none for the foreseeable future. I’ll just have to deal.

Trades: again, none for the foreseeable future. I can’t afford them and frankly I have enough to read.

Action figures; haven’t bought one for quite some time now and if I never buy another one for myself again I think I’ll be fine. The only ones that even remotely tripped my switch were the upcoming Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends set, but that’s pure nostalgia and I will probably end up not buying it.

Movies; no new DVDs. There are a few the wife and I want to see in theaters this year, but they are few and far between.

And that is the plan. It’s a brand new world really. It is time to buckle down and get busy dragging myself out of the hole I have managed to dig for myself.

So the question becomes how do you plan to get out of this financial quagmire, Mike?

Come back tomorrow to find out.

More to follow…

I’m not going to be around that much this week.  I am still trying to shake the last vestiges of the Cold of Doom: 2009 Edition that is still stuck in my sinuses.  Seriously.  This is the worst freaking cold thing I have had since my honeymoon in 2003 when I lost my voice for a few days and earned the undying respect of one of my customers at Home Depot.

So yeah, going to keep a low Internet profile with the exception of this week’s episode of Views and a review I am about to finish up for the Spider-Man Crawlspace.  For the five or six people that follow this blog that aren’t related to me (Hi, Jane!) come back next week and I will have some cool stuff or at least stuff I think is cool.

More to follow…cough…

Last week my glasses broke.

There I was, sitting in bed, petting the dog and suddenly my lens pops out of my glasses.  Surprisingly this was not too surprising.  My glasses were nearing the end of their run and I knew this because the screw in the right side was getting progressively looser and every once in a while the lens would just…fall out.  Why didn’t I get new glasses when this started?  I have no idea.  I’m like that.  Until a problem is thrusting itself in my face I tend to ignore it.  So the lens falls out, I sit up and realize that the lens popped out not because of the screw on the right side but because the frame snapped off at the top right near the bridge.

Crap.

With help from the wife the glasses were “repaired” and I was upset because I really didn’t have the money to get the situation fixed.  That’s just how the situation is and I was rather…distraught.  Rachel calmed me down and with the glasses somewhat in one piece I knew I could get through to this week when I could afford to get my eyes examined and new glasses.

Today I went to the optometrist and had my eyes checked out.  I actually like this new eye doctor that I am going to.  He was an affable guy who sat there and explained why I am kind of unlucky in the bad eyesight department.  I am far sighted in one eye and near sighted in the other.  This presents a certain number of problems mainly because my brain is constantly trying to focus and really can’t because things aren’t even which leads it to, every once in a while, tell my left eye to take a rest while it tries to sort things out.  This causes my left eye to be “lazy”.  I find it amusing that given my constant struggle with most issues and seeing all sides of said issues that even my eyes can’t agree on what to do.

So they had me look through the funky machines, they did the pressure test and then came my favorite part, the dilation of my eyes.  A couple of drops and suddenly my eyes are tricked into thinking that it’s really, really dark.  Boo yah.  Everything checks out, though.  My eyes are slightly worse than last time but nothing terrible until I’m forty apparently.  I picked out a new pair of frames that closely resembled my current pair and looking through those frames drove home several points, the first being that my face is rather uninteresting and that glasses help this situation.  It’s why I have facial hair, really.  Well, that and my wife likes it and points and laughs when I shave it off claiming that I look like I’m 12.  She wants me to grow a beard, but I have done so in the past and always felt that a full on beard makes me look like the type of guy that shows up on your doorstep one day to say, “Hey, yeah.  My name is Michael and because of Meagan’s Law I have to tell you I moved in down the street.”

The other point is that there the a simple change in frame design means the difference between me looking studious and me looking like a complete and utter dork.  Rectangular = fine.  Round = where’s my pocket protector, yo?  Seriously.  It was kind of jarring.  I mean I knew I couldn’t go “old man” nor could I get “stylish” frames because, well, that’s just not me.  I’m a simple soul.  Flashy only describes a certain portion of my comic book collection.  Sure I have this thing for button downs that look like David Banner should be taking them off a laundry line, but still.  I was amused by the whole thing really, but still.  Weird.

While they were checking my eyes and playing tricks on them one of the guys tried to further fix my glasses, which failed miserably.  The glasses finally broke beyond repair, so I am without glasses until the new ones come in.  This added to the several hours where bright light and focusing were damn near impossible and I wasn’t in the best of moods today.

I really don’t know how this is going to affect my posting here this week.  Staring at the computer screen is proving…difficult.  Annoying really.  I wanted to get a lot more done this week, but I don’t know how well that’s going to work out.  I mean this post is turning out kind of long and I am regretting that the more I type.  So I don’t know how loud or quiet I’ll be this week. Thought y’all might like the heads up.

More to follow…at some point…

Last week around this time I was kind of bummed out because I had lost my wedding ring.  When I got home that night I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t do much of anything else so I started on a project that I had been thinking about doing for a couple days namely reorganizing the Fortress, a.k.a. the room I use as my “office”.

The Fortress is actually a converted bedroom.  I’ve been using this space for nearly nine years now and it has gone through many incarnations but for the longest time it was set up from the time my wife and I shared the space.  For various reasons Rachel stopped using her side of the room and it got messy.  How messy?

This messy.

Read more…

My lovely wife was not a comic book fan when we first met.  She didn’t dislike them and had a passing knowledge of the characters thanks to movies and television but she was not all about the hobby and it took some adjusting on her part to get used to my addiction collecting.  She understood the mentality.  When we began dating in 1999 Rachel was heavily into collectible Barbie dolls.  The kind that cost up to four hundred bucks so she grasped the collecting side of things but the week in, week out grind of going to the shop and getting something that regularly was something she just didn’t understand at first.  Over the years she got used to it and is very supportive of me.  Some would call her an enabler and some would be absolutely correct. 

The one thing I tried never to do is force comics on to her.  I think I may have offered once or twice but I had learned some time before that pushing comics onto a girlfriend is rarely a good idea.  Either someone gets it or they don’t.  There is always the chance of the spontaneous love of comics hitting a loved one but I have never seen this personally.  Despite Rachel seeming to like the various animated series I have foisted upon her she never caught the comic book reading bug.

Until 2002 and a little book called Fables.

Read more…

I have the sixth part of my That and Fifteen Buck Will Get You Some Secret Origins written.  All it needs is some clean up and to be posted.  The plan was to get that done tonight when I got home from work.  Frankly I don’t feel like doing so right now.

I lost my wedding ring today. 

I can’t tell you how upset I am about this.  It wasn’t extravagant.  It wasn’t full of jewels, but it meant something to me and now I can’t find it.

I’m sad now.

This is what I get for losing weight.

Rachel has been incredible about this.  Most wives would lose their freaking minds, but she told me that with all we have been through over the past nine years losing this is not the biggest deal.  So kudos for my wife for being loving, supportive and awesome.

So I have a little something planned for tomorrow and I’ll be back on Monday with the Wonder Woman installment of my first big series of posts. 

Quick announcement of sorts; I am going to a Monday through Friday schedule starting on Monday.  Blogging seven days a week is getting to be a bit much.  I need a day or so to just do nothing, so while there may be days where I produce more than one post Saturday and Sunday is going to be kind of barren around here.  Feel free to use this time to make copious comments.

More to follow…

Or maybe this post should be titled, The Sort of New, Kind of Different Fortress of Baileytude, as that would be more accurate.

Well, the week or so I took off was nice and I won’t promise daily postings, but for now it seems I have returned because this part of my life is tanned, rested and ready to talk some comics.

Actually two things brought me out, one of them being the release of not one but two episodes of Views From The Longbox last week.  I got in a groove of prepping the show notes the night before and then actually posting them the next morning and it felt right.  Looking at my schedule next week I believe I can do the same thing for this blog and while what I have to say may not be epic in scope I figure a little something is better than a whole lot of nothing.

The other thing that brought me back to this blog is something occurred to me while I was at work today.  I am not reading a whole heck of a lot of new comics lately.  I just can’t afford them at the moment and that fact doesn’t sadden me as it might have  a year or so ago.  It’s actually quite liberating. 

Read more…