flashback a bit … I quit paying attention to comics for the nth time around 2007 – Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics imprint had folded, and Warren Ellis’ runs on Plantary & Nextwave were wrapping up. There just was not a lot to keep me interested in getting to the comic book store. Skip forward to about 2010 or 2011 and I realized somehow that I really like the vast majority of what Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis had written. This kept me paying attention to comics for a while as I read a bunch of back issues, and managed to pick up on the awesomeness that entails Brandon Graham, James Stekoe, Colleen Coover, and the Immonens… However, Warren Ellis dropped out of the field about a year ago, and Bendis’ writing has seemed strained (as in “six-plus scripts every month and tapping out quickly….”) for the last 6 months or so… the “Marvel NOW” rebrand seemed like it’d be a step in the right direction, but it just managed to tank out everything. Kathryn Immonen’s Journey Into Mystery was a breath of fresh air at first, but now is embedding itself back into mainstream continuity and sort of not going anywhere :( Bendis’ X-men runs are particularly uninteresting, as if he’d lost interest in anything about anything (the obnoxiousness of those characters probably doesn’t help much either…) Fraction & Allred’s FF run has not panned out to be anywhere near as awesome as that lineup should be capable of. On the other hand, the Hawkeye book by Fraction & Aja is hands down the best thing that Fraction has done since Casanova, and is probably the best mainstream book since Ellis & Immonen’s Nextwave. The end result of all this is that I’ve massively lost interest in the world of comic books… still gonna be paying attention to the Immonens, Coover, Graham, Stekoe, Chris Ware, Matt Howarth, Darwyn Cooke and probably a couple others, but these people get books on the stands so infrequently… prob gonna stop commenting on comics regularly and trying to get back to the music thing… yay…