Hello world.
The internet is a cantankerous place. Trapped in the twilight of Eternal September, a constant stream of snark and curmudgeonry and invective is fired into a hellish echo chamber of ever-increasing volume.
And now it’s my turn to contribute.
Welcome to Shouting Ire in an Empty Theatre. The ire part seems self explanatory and the empty theatre bit is either a clever reference back to the aforementioned echo chamber or terribly low self-esteem.
We’ll mostly be dealing with terrible comic books here with some occasional diversions into other things that manage to make me terribly angry. Heck, if it gets slow, you might even see posts about things that I can sort of stand.
Here’s how this is going to go. I came of age as a fan in the 90′s with an interest and collection stretching back to the beginning of the form. I read ‘em all, especially 60′s-90′s Marvel, post-crisis DC, and pretty much anything published after 1991. After a somewhat haphazard reading schedule in the mid-oughts, I’m back to picking up a fair variety of books, many of which are good, but an equal number of which fill me with apocalyptic fury. Ooh, these comical books today, with their lack of respect for continuity or characters and their insistence on piling dull crisis upon dull crisis and their new number ones and the blatant “every issue is someone’s first” rule violations and the senseless retconning and don’t even get me started on the horrible, wretched abominations they laughingly call movies or…
Sorry, got carried away. Frankly, you’ll probably see that happen again.
Anyway, each post will consist of me picking up something semi-random I’ve picked up, chances are out of a dollar box, and tearing it to shreds where it warrants it. It won’t exclusively be new stuff, but that’ll be the bulk of it.
Please note that I do not promise this will be interesting or very coherent or really anything but extremely cathartic. For me, naturally. I make no claims as to what the rest of you will get out of it, but here it will be, such as it is.