All New, All Different Thought Balloons

It is time for a change. Truth be told, Thought Balloons was originally created to fill a course requirement. I needed to write one blog post a week, about anything that interested me. Comic books were the obvious go-to, since I’ve been reading them since before I even cared what the stories were about. The bright costumes and big action of nineties comics were what drew my eye, made me want to run around the front yard growling at my cousins and call people “bub”. Although I felt bad for Wolverine, because I knew even as a kid that Jean would never leave Cyclops for him, it wouldn’t be until much later that I understood the torment of being in love with someone who is attached to a colossal tool (more on this at a later date).

Throughout the semester, I updated the site pretty regularly, trying and failing to maintain two posts a week, a review on Wednesday and a feature/news article on Friday. I modeled the look and approach after the movie news blog, /Film – which I’m an avid fan of – and decided create the comic book version of that. What I have learned since I started this endeavor is that I don’t want to be a geek news blogger. It felt mostly like I was regurgitating other people’s content. When it was time to write a review, I only wrote positive reactions to the stuff I liked. Certainly, I’ve read some comics that really sucked since I started this blog, but my dream job is to write comics, and it just seemed in poor taste to use this platform to shit all over the people who are right now doing what I only hope to do. The process of updating this blog became very unsatisfying, and once the semester was over I stopped writing it.

There still exists this fine blog here, though. I put way more energy than I needed to in the design, spent hours learning basic Photoshop, HTML, and CSS, and I really dig how it turned out. I don’t want to let it go to waste. But what to do about content?

Here is the plan. I’m going to transform Thought Balloons from a comic book news and review blog to my own personal creative nonfiction (fight amongst yourselves about what that means) laboratory. The tagline for this blog is “Thinking About Comics”. It’s time to do more to live up to that, in deeper, more personal ways that aren’t strictly news reporting.

I hope you will join me.

Sincerely,

Joseph