Farewell, sweet prince
/This is the end of the Savage Critics.
Really, this is entirely because I am a complete idiot; in about sixteen different ways.
To start with, I've always been the world's most unreasonable collaborator. I expect people to do shit exactly like I want it, but I'm not very good about expressing what that exactly is BEFORE I expect the thing. In practice, that's almost barely workable in my physical stores, but it's never ever worked with anything even slightly open like the internet.
Savage Critics started back from the old CompuServe days, where I would read an entire week's worth of comics, and give one word (or up to a sentence, maybe) reviews. I was young, and (well, I thought) very clever, so making snap judgements publicly seemed entertaining to me (at least). Once gated communities like CompuServe became passe (well, until Facebook, at least), I thought it might be cool to do the same thing on the internet as a stand alone blog. It was the Wild West back then, and this was an early blog (I think Tom Spurgeon called it "foundational" at one point?) of commentary and criticism.
I had a decent run, I think, of doing the snap review thing -- a couple of years where I was mostly weekly, but eventually I started to flag. I thought I could bring in Jeff Lester to make up for me flaking, but in reality that mostly meant trying to offshore everything on to Jeff. And then we added Graeme, and it became the same thing even more. Even Graeme's lovely wife Kate got sucked in, redesigning the site, and ending up with me thinking "Ah, she's handling all the backstage stuff forever, right?"
Even our big expansions, where I tried to invite lots of wonderful, active, smart bloggers to come be part of this "brand", it was mostly me trying to avoid work myself -- if I have 7 guys each posting weekly, then I can post a lot less, right? Hell, this continues to this very day where the utterly fantastic John K (UK) basically single-handedly keeps this thing running with real content. All I ever do is say "Hey! I wrote another TILTING". Even the weekly shipping list thread? It has my NAME on it, but its been written by my manager Doug Slayton for like the last three years.
Most recently I tortured the awesome Thom Venier (who redesigned the general Comix Experience site) with a lot of unreasonable demands to get Sav Crit off of Wordpress and on to something that wasn't spam injected and gross and horrible. He has done, in my opinion, not only an excellent job, but did so way above and beyond anything I deserve, trying to do stuff that only ever existed in my mind, and wasn't on the "old Sav Crit" site for probably a half-decade. I was an ass to him about a lot of it, and I apologize here publicly: I am sorry Thom.
My main goal was to preserve the decade or so of content -- there's some EXCELLENT writing on here... virtually none of it mine. And its here, and all of the tags and everything are all still there, so its at least somewhat searchable. Long-time internet searches are probably going to be fucked up now, but hopefully the search engines will find things again. (Seriously, Type "Jog" into that side searchbar, and get lost in dozens of excellent pieces! Or go read the thrilling "The Case Against Dan Didio" -- the categories, the tags... you should be able to find lots of cool stuff)
So I apologize for being a shitty leader, and not at all appreciative enough over the years to Jeff Lester and Graeme McMillan. To Kate McMillan. To Abhay Kholsa and Jordan Smith and John Kane. To Sean Collins, Chris Eckert, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, David Uzumeri, and Douglas Wolk. To Doug Slayton. To Thom Venier. To all of you I am really sorry.
And you, dear reader -- there are still scores of you who have followed this thing through thick and thin. All of our regular commenters -- esp Peter, Thelonious_Nick, MBunge, John D, Davids O, and T, Corey (Ottawa) and Chris Hero.
To me, Savage Critic is NOT Comix Experience, but the nature of the Squarespace account means it has to have the branding on it, but that totally shreds my last bits of interest in being "Savage". There's a place for snark, but a commercial businesses site is kind of not that place, and so I'm going to call this blog here and now -- I've saved all of the past content, and I'll keep paying for the domain name as long as we keep the store going so as to keep it alive, but this is the functional end of Savage Critics.
I intend to build a NEW blog for Comix Experience in the next few days (before next week's new comics announcements, for sure), so we can continue to post the shipping lists, and any news of note, and I'll put that URL here as soon as I build it, and I hope those of you who have fun sharing your "What looks good to you?" answers each week will continue to do that there.
The new Comix Experience blog (with shipping lists, etc.) is here: https://www.comixexperience.com/news/
Again, thank you everyone I named above, as well as everyone that I didn't, and I really do sincerely apologize for my failures of leadership over the years.
