Blam’s Next Blog

A very long time coming, I Have Issues has gone live.



Kind-of. I’m stretching the definition of “live” there. Right now all you get is a logo
and tag line, plus — maybe, depending on the results of my internal debate over whether it adds value or subtracts from the minimalist placeholder — a brief mission statement. But at least the URL works. I registered the domain a while ago now and have been planning the site for more than a decade.

My objective when I started Blam’s Blog was to get the hang of the process from a technical standpoint and see if I could turn out posts on a predictable basis. I’d only recently obtained a computer and regular Web access for the first time in several years — not always so regular, as it happened, which became an ongoing road block to multiple projects. The health problems that led to such a lack of connectivity also compromised my ability to write. During those years offline I had two aims should I be able to rejoin an Internet whose speed and breadth were clearly exploding: put all my past work (reviews, articles, interviews) about comics online for posterity and — this second is really a few — blog about the experience of comprehensively reading through my collection of comics, adding whatever I could to the astounding repository of knowledge at the Grand Comics Database, before selling most of my collection off.

Once I got into a rhythm here, albeit one whose tempo kept changing, I continued to share links and thoughts on what I was reading and watching as I labored to organize my comics. That labor proved for a variety of reasons to be more… laborious*… than expected and the level of satisfaction I found in producing new material for this blog was seductive enough to skew my priorities. (*Sorry. To be honest, I’m pleasantly surprised when I can make it this far into something before hitting the wall.)

A couple of years back, I finally sprung for a storage unit because I didn’t have the
space at home to both house and sort the collection. I’d hoped to get Issues running in earnest by my 50th birthday last October, and in fact a version of this post went up in January 2020, but I’ve just not been able to bank enough material to weather the inevitable rough patches and still feel confident of publishing at bare minimum one installment per week.

There will be plenty of notice here when I Have Issues starts rolling. While Blam’s Blog itself should, fingers crossed, be more active by then, for now it seems like a good idea to display that old can of Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup again.



Related: The Slog • Blam’s Bio • Number Ones