Nineteenth Anniversary Post

Today is the anniversary of Antick Musings! I first posted on this day in 2005; that first post is very tentative and pointless.

In the heady first decade of this blog, I pulled out all the stops for the big anniversary post every October 4th, with long lists of links and pointless statistics that I don't think any of you actually read or cared about. More recently, I've forgotten to do the post entirely about half the time, and have (this may be psychologically important) missed or bobbled all of the round-number anniversaries - five, ten, and fifteen.

This year, this anniversary post will probably turn into something - I'm starting it over a month ahead of time, so with luck I won't forget it - but I make no promises.

History of the Blog: Links to Links

First, though, let me link to the past installments of this annual post: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth. and seventeenth.
Each of those is itself mostly a list of links, making this section the most purely blog-like thing I do regularly. (Remember: I started off in this world writing the SFBC's blog, which was a major link-fest, like so many things of that era. We spent our time pointing to things, and we were happy to do it!)

I usually try to explain that history or origin in more detail here, so maybe one or two more sentences: I started Antick Musings as practice, since the book-club company I worked for was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the SFBC. That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times and has continued to...let me be kind and say "transform;" I think a few people I knew still work there - so the fact that my personal blog has kept going, even in so ramshackle a state, is a testament to something, I suppose.

Anyway, this was...not an afterthought, but definitely not meant to be a specific thing. It turned into a book blog, which was the one thing I was absolutely sure in 2005 it would not be; I read and edited books for a day-job, so touching that more than very, very lightly here would have been a bad idea.

Such are the dreams of our youth.

I will also point out here that I'm still using the template I picked, nineteen years ago. It's not currently available in the Blogger console, and it's probably broken in at least a few ways - the blogroll, in particular, has not been touched in the slightest since about Year Three. But every time I look at the array of possible Blogger templates, I hate all of them and find them all ugly and generic. If I had a lot of energy and time (and a willingness to spend money of it), I'd port the whole thing to WordPress, refurbish from top to bottom, and have something that looked nice.

That will never happen.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

I've consistently thrown into this annual post my one random metric: the number of posts each year. It means essentially nothing, but it's a tradition, and nineteen years later, traditions are pretty much all I have. So here goes:

• 2023-2024 -- 405 posts
• 2022-2023 -- 410 posts
• 2021-2022 -- 279 posts
• 2020-2021 -- 265 posts
• 2019-2020 -- 55 posts
• 2018-2019 -- 178 posts
• 2017-2018 -- 368 posts
• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

I had another blog for a couple of years about a decade ago - Editorial Explanations, where I made fun of editorial cartoons at pretty much exactly the point when they began their own extinction event. I enjoyed doing it until I didn't, and then I stopped. It was a long time ago, and it doesn't matter now, so I've stopped adding them in to the blog-post totals. That blog itself is still available for anyone with an interest in decade-old political bullshit. (I will note that bullshit of that era feels almost quaint and homey these days.)

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

As I said above, this turned into a book-blog after I lost my editorial job - and I did wonder, years later, if my opinions here did contribute, in some small way, to my never getting another editorial job despite trying off and on for a few years. (Probably not: it's a ferociously competitive field, and almost impossible to get back on the horse once you fall off.) 

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

It's not very long, it's funny on every page, and it's true in ways that will sour bad books for you forever - which is a good thing, since who wants to waste time on bad books?

Those are the things that are assumed to be central to an American identity: what's on the left side of the "something-American" hyphen?

The mind can slip into fantasy at any moment - a stream of thought moving from what is to oh god, what if at any time.

And if you're looking for a comic strip way more centrally about cannibalism than you suspected was possible, it's really your only choice.

I really like how cartoonists are no longer tied down to linear time. In the bad old days, a comics story might have a flashback - one big one, with huge caption boxes and every other signpost the creators could think of - but that was about it; the audience was assumed to be too young and/or unsophisticated to handle complicated transitions.

Ackroyd is faithful to the religious tone of Mallory's original: they all praise God a lot and are firmly convinced that beating someone up in a joust proves that you're true and righteous, which is a comforting thing for bullies and the strong to believe in all ages.

Reader, there is nothing here you will not predict, nothing that gives a true moment of surprise or wonder, nothing that isn't entirely derivative and utterly pre-determined. This is a piece of product, an engineered jigsaw puzzle piece that slots in exactly in the middle of all of the other pieces to make a bland picture of people punching each other.

The most interesting creators are the ones you have to learn how to read. They tell stories their way, making their choices but not going out of their way to explain. And it can take reading a few books to figure that out: not all readers will want to spend that much effort.

Bagge's worlds are full of mildly updated '50s gender-essentialism: men are hot-headed and often physically violent, because They Are Men and the World Is Frustrating. Sometimes they are divided into the smart ones (effete, tentative, too weak for this world, typically wearing glasses) and the strong ones (stupid as a post, addicted to incredibly counterproductive ideas, full of zeal and energy for all the wrong things, typically wearing mullets).

You might say, "that's a mighty big topic to cover in one l'il 200-page book, now, isn't it, pardner?" (If you weren't pretending to be a cowboy, you might use different phrasing, admittedly.)

But you would think that a class of people who are often annoyed by the "where do you get your ideas?" question would be somewhat more reticent to spin complex tales of "here's how this guy got his ideas." You would think, but you would be wrong, because it happens a lot.

Today, I have a book that kicks that door open, rips it off its hinges, chops it up for firewood, burns it down, dances on the ashes, and then falls over, awkwardly, to get bruised and covered with schmutz.

The creator is Zerocalcare - apparently, that was the jingle for a cleaning product, which the guy named Michele Rech started using as an online handle and then just kept using when he started making comics. (As someone with a blog and other social accounts under the name "G.B.H. Hornswoggler," I understand the impulse.)

So this is a book about, mostly, crazy optimists who are mostly in their mid-twenties, mostly have never failed at anything in their lives, and mostly have never seen a problem they couldn't just solve by working harder. 

There might be some element of the "British phrases help sell humorous SFF to Americans" engine working here - people like me who have read a lot of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are prone to think phrases like "luck's not a wheelbarrow; you don't want to push it" are interesting and quirky rather than (as Brits I suppose might) some dull thing Uncle Rupert says every damn day.

But one weird thing about getting older is that I find it's easier to see creators at different points in their lives - that parallax of my own life making it clearer that this is a young man's book and that is from the older version.

The whole point is that people can't take it, of course. They collapse, drop out. You can't have an elimination competition without eliminating people.

It must be nice to be a world-famous and -popular writer. You can get nice little additional revenue streams from normal life stuff such as "owning a lot of T-shirts" and "talking to a guy from a magazine."

What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm.

A baby is a wrinkled, red-faced, crying lump, capable only of wanting things. That's not inherently lovable.

Just so you know: I wouldn't pay attention to me about superhero comics. If I wasn't already me, I mean.

When I have to make a random choice of what to read next, I try to ask "what looks weirdest."

But that's always the way: no one is as radical as they think they are, no one is as fearless at confronting their real flaws as they want to believe.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I do, occasionally, post about other things. This year and last, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays - I like music, though I think I write about it substantially more awkwardly and less well than I do about books, so I try to keep my illusions very minor.

When I get new books - however I get them, after some waffling about tags and titles a few years back - I post a list here under Reviewing the Mail, a title I stole from Chuck Klosterman. I don't claim to do that quickly - lately I tend to take bigger book-shopping lists and break them over multiple weeks - but I do it, eventually.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and whatever Sunday is closest to Independence Day.)

But...that was pretty much it. I'm still, a decade later, surprised that my absolutely-no-chance-it-will-turn-into-a-book-blog did exactly that, but there's a limit to how surprised anyone can be by the same thing over an extended period of time. It is what it is.

Valediction

That's it. Year Nineteen is now over, and I guess I'm into Year Twenty. If I keep to form, you won't have to worry about a post like this next year, and then I'll be back at the end of Year Twenty-One with a weird apology. Or maybe noticing the pattern will stop it?

Who knows. I hope the self-indulgent things you do are equally fulfilling to you, now and into the future. Now go forth and read somebody else's blog.