I ATEN'T DEAD.

I don't even want to think about how long it's been since I updated this blog. A combination of pressure at work, evening classes, co-authoring a guidebook to Dublin, and planning the paper I was to present at this conference on comics ate up all my spare time and brainspace. Now my evening classes have all finished, my workplace is less pressured, the guidebook is on the verge of being sent to the printers, and the conference is over (and a very good conference it was too). So there is hope that this blog may turn out to have been only mostly dead, in the manner of a Marvel superhero.

For complicated personal reasons no doubt related to the phase of the moon or fluctuations in sunspot activity or something, my enthusiasm for comics had waned over the past six months or so. It has been months since I went into a comics shop; my pile of unread graphic novels remains stubbornly and intimidatingly high. (I did eventually put them on a shelf, which doesn't make it any easier to read them but at least prevents me from tripping over them in the dark.) The conference has rekindled that enthusiasm, as I had hoped it would, and I will, I think, have more to say here and elsewhere on the subject of comics. Today I even bought new comics for the first time in ages -- Parasyte vol 1 and Scott Pilgrim vs the Universe, which has a shiny shiny cover and is no doubt shiny in a metaphorical sense as well.