Announcing . . .

 

Today I am pleased to announce the release of a new anthology of my work - The Putative Hurting - available now and for the foreseeable future from my Patreon. Check out the Introduction below:

Howdy! If you’re new to the party, thanks for reading. I’ll try to keep the preamble succinct.

The present volume was conceived as a kind of satellite to a larger anthology, The Portable Hurting, designed to celebrate twenty years of work as a comic book critic. As enjoyable as it was to assemble, the finished manuscript became too big to fulfill its initial purpose, twice over. The Portable was initially intended to be a new giveaway for my Patreon, to replace the warhorse Hurting Sampler that had served that function for almost four years. The latter collection had begun to show its age as a representative collection of my work (tho’ it yet lives, behind the paywall, for anyone who wants the exclusive stuff therein). In any event as The Portable became much larger in practice than conception, the addition of 20,000 words of new Introductions added up to frankly more material than I felt comfortable producing for a giveaway. 

The compromise upon which I landed was that The Portable Hurting, conceived as a self-indulgent career retrospective, was offered free for a time on my blog. A gift from me to my audience as a token of twenty years’ esteem. The existence of this volume means however that The Portable has now retreated to its forever home behind the paywall, replaced by this: a slimmer giveaway but hopefully more effective promotional tool. If you already have The Portable Hurting - or if you’ve been following my writing for any time - there’s nothing new here, save for the addition of last year’s “As If By Chisel.” The essay on Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters wasn’t in the previous volume simply by virtue of having been too recent a publication, then not even six months old on The Comics Journal website. 

But if you are new to the party, or in need of a refresher, this has what you need. All killer, no filler: “There Are Two Silver Surfers,” “Jerk City, USA,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Kingdom Come.” Eddie Campbell and Chris Ware. Steve Gerber and Dwayne McDuffie. Stan “The Man” Lee and Brian “Motherfucking” Bendis. All the old circus animals, those stilted boys.

The purpose of this collection is not, however, for me to reminisce, but to get out of the way. If you want to know more about anything herein the resources are available one or two pages further. But if you downloaded this randomly off the internet because you saw something I wrote and were curious to learn more - well, I’d say you should browse at your pleasure, but if you’d like a push I think the aforementioned “There Are Two Silver Surfers” is probably as good a place to start as any. I’m also partial to “True Believers,” myself, and my most loyal readers really like “Jerk City, USA.” 

Please, enjoy, and thank you for reading! If the last twenty years of writing have taught me anything - I’m nothing without my readers. I appreciate everyone who joins that number.   

TO