There's a condition known as writer's block where a writer is unable to produce anything new. The ideas aren't there, or nothing seems right, so nothing is written. When I look back at the dates of my last posts on this blog, I myself am surprised at how quiet it – and thereby I – have grown on the subject of comics. It seems as though I have writer's block.
In fact, that is not the case. Not only have I written a great deal on other topics, posted elsewhere or manifested some other way, but I have even written quite a bit about comics since the summer of 2017. As it happens, a good deal of what I have written has not been posted. So perhaps one might say that I have had poster's block.
In the past two and a half years, I have in fact posted quite a bit about Doomsday Clock while it was in the process of being published, but scarcely about anything else, with just a few posts about Grant Morrison's The Green Lantern and one on Heroes in Crisis, whereas back in 2017, I posted on no fewer than eight different creative works across film, TV, and comics. And then, after a very detailed analysis of Final Crisis, this blog has, aside from the aforementioned foci, gone silent.
Part of that has been due to the overall interruption in regular life that has affected all of us over recent months and recent years. But in the meantime, I have begun unpublished posts about, among other works:
• Grant Morrison's Supergods.
• Twin Peaks: The Return.
• Scott Snyder's work on Dark Nights: Metal and Justice League.
• Grant Morrison's The Green Lantern.
• Frank Miller's Superman: Earth One.
• Tom Taylor's DCeased.
• Tom King's Heroes in Crisis.
• Brian Michael Bendis' Superman series.
• The 2019 Joker movie.
Why write things and not post? Or: Why begin a post and not finish? There isn't one reason that applies in every case, but three reasons came up often:
1) I enjoyed a particular work but just didn't have much to say about my enjoyment. That was certainly true of Tom King's Batman, Morrison's Green Lantern, and Bendis' Superman titles.
2) I was nonplussed when a work that seemed to have great bearing on the future of other storylines fizzled, reaching an end with no impact on what was to follow. I could say that of Doomsday Clock and Superman: Earth One and some others.
3) I had things to say but they weren't very nice. This was true, in particular, with the aforementioned works from Scott Snyder. I found myself beginning posts that explained in great detail why his works brought me little pleasure and mucked up the cosmology of the DC Universe. I also found myself variously displeased and even sickened by DCeased and sorry that I had picked it up. And even as I wrote down these opinions, I found that they were exactly the kind of piece that I did not enjoy when some other commentator posted them about some other work: If a reader does not enjoy a work, why not move on to the other things in life? And as I moved on to the other things life, this blog went quiet.
That said, I am enjoying one series so much that I will remain silent no longer, and my next post will be about that series. See you soon.
