Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age of Horror has been thinking big lately. First he had that great post on repetition and genre, and now he's going meta with a thoughtful post on the Horror Blogosphere itself--or the lack thereof. Curt's thesis is that while there are obviously quite a few horror blogs, and while several of them are occasionally brought together by such features as The Horror Blog's Horror Roundtable or Final Girl's Film Club or my own sadly defunct Where the Monsters Go link page, or even just individual link posts by various and sundry bloggers, there's not a cohesive feel to this so-called "blogosphere." Ideas don't go viral, group conversation doesn't really occur, topics don't get advanced from one site to another to another. What he calls for to solve this problem is essentially a lynchpin linkblog site with a distinct host identity to keep track of all the goings-on on the multitudinous horror blogs and sites, point out commonalities and trends, and so on.

I feel I am bizarrely well-equipped to comment on this concept because, as very long-time readers of ADDTF might recall, I was actually a part of another nerdblogging scene during its nascent stages--the comics blogosphere. While not part of the first-gen cohort--I'm at least one step removed from NeilAlien--I was one of (I'd guess) the first dozen or so comics blogs--in other words, part of the first group of comics blogs that thought of itself as The Comics Blogosphere. IIRC this group consisted of myself, NeilAlien, Jim Henley, Franklin Harris, Johnny Bacardi, Alan David Doane, Bill Sherman, Tegan Gjovaag, Eve Tushnet, Elayne Riggs, Steven Wintle, Big Sunny D, Dave Intermittent, and Dirk Deppey. Some of those folks were bloggier than others, some were comicsier than others, some were more into the group aspect of it than others, but I think that was the basic breakdown.

Now, how did this motley crew of individuals achieve some sort of group sentience, a la Grant Morrison's DCU? It was indeed the creation of a medium-spanning, labor-intensive, personality-driven linkblog: Dirk Deppey and The Comics Journal's Journalista. Heck, I even wrote about this phenomenon at the time, likening it to the way the establishment of big-name liberal and conservative linkblogs drove the success of the political blogosphere. Not only did Dirk keep tabs on running discussions, contribute to them himself, and become a repository of topics to inspire new discussions, he also served as a model followed by what I think of as the "third wave" of comics blogs, the now-defunct efforts of people like Kevin Melrose and Graeme McMillan and John Jakala (not to mention Dave "Babar" G.'s Comic Weblog Update Page, from which Where the Monsters Go borrowed its code) that I think directly led to the HUGE explosion and proliferation of comics blogs that gave us the massive, no-one-person-can-keep-track comics blogosphere we have today. Nowadays the comics blogosphere is so big that Journalista's central role is shared by at least three other sites: Tom Spurgeon's The Comics Reporter, Heidi MacDonald's The Beat, and Newsarama's Blog@Newsarama.

So I think Curt is dead on: If you want a horror blogosphere like the Comics Blogosphere, you need a horror blog like Journalista.

But do I want a horror blogosphere like the Comics Blogosphere?

When I took my job at Wizard I was forced to stop blogging about comics. I kind of hemmed and hawed about what to blog about for a while, just doing odds and ends for a bit, then taking a short break, then doing a music-and-movies blog that was actually a cover for the horror-fiction project in blog format it was eventually to become. When I returned to ADDTF in full force, I made it a horror blog, which it stayed until Wizard let me go and I was able to start blogging about comics again. Now I split it about 50/50.

But if you look at my comics content now versus my comics content then--let alone compare my horror content to my old comics content--I think there's a world of difference. In terms of comics, I feel NO pressure to comment on EVERYTHING, like I used to. I'm much less likely to snark. I'm much less likely to dogpile on comics-blogosphere whipping boys, much less likely to get involved in back-and-forth debates. I'm spending a lot more time reviewing what I read, much of which is books that are months or even years old rather than this week's big release. And as for my horror blogging, I've never done anything but blog about the kinds of works and topics that interest me and only those works and topics. (ADDTF: Your Clive Barker/Giant Squid Headquarters!) To the extent that other people are as interested in reading my email exchanges about The Ruins and The Wire and discussing Cloverfield and the merits of the term "torture porn" as I am, then this is a pretty terrific horror blog, I suppose.

The thing is, I can't imagine doing it some other way. I look at the sites that do cover what they consider to be the length and breadth of the horror field--your Bloody Disgustings and Arrow in the Heads and Dread Centrals and so on--and all I see are hype-driven posts about the latest direct-to-DVD release, the latest parody with zombies in it, people objecting in principle to J-horror or PG-13 ratings, posts about the next project for the writers of Turistas...To a certain extent, the comics blogosphere focuses way too much on equivalent topics--the latest event comic from or picayune pseudofeminist outrage over the Big Two superhero publishers, getting really excited if someone on television or in an entertainment magazine mentions Joss Whedon, yadda yadda yadda.

I think I'm just rambling now, but my point is, if given a choice between a horror blogosphere where we're all talking about the same things or a horror blogosphere where it's a bunch of intense loners off in their own corners blogging about whatever tickles their fancy, I'd probably take the latter. While I certainly would read a Journalista-esque horror blog (it'd probably beat what I'm getting from the big horror sites!), I'm probably okay without it.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 6:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)