Curt at Groovy Age has posted the latest installment in an ongoing conversation regarding the state of the horror blogosphere and the role a prominent, hosted linkblog could play in its maturation. In this go-round, I am particularly fond of his rationale for wanting a more cohesive blogosphere for the genre in the first place:

I think there's a massive horror fan-base that's almost entirely oblivious to the existence of horror blogs, and I suspect that's largely because we remain "a bunch of intense loners off in their own corners." My hunch is that if we pulled together and achieved some kind of critical mass, we'd make a much bigger splash in horror fandom. Which is another way of saying, the audience most likely to appreciate and embrace what we're doing would actually begin to find its way to us in increasingly significant numbers.

Yeah, numbers. There, I said it. A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more people every day sitting down with their morning coffee or evening drink, visiting my blog in eager anticipation, and smiling at what they see or read? A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more heads nodding or shaking when I spin out my theories on horror and genre? A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more personal tastes educated to appreciate the kind of vintage horror I love so much? A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more pairs of eyeballs on reviews of current writers or artists I'm excited about and trying to promote? Hell yeah, you're goddamn right I want that! And so would those thousand or hundred or even just ten more people, if only they had some clue that Groovy Age existed.

I think what burned me a bit on the comics blogosphere--and don't get me wrong, I still read dozens every day while reading nearly zero comics magazines or websites proper--is this sense of "blogger triumphalism" that arose when it became apparent that comics blogs as a collective entity had a substantial readership and therefore could actually have an impact on the areas they cover. Because comics blogs became able to drive conversation about comics online, I think they (and I) developed a sense of self-importance that does not become them, which manifests itself in all different ways: A need to comment in backseat-driver/armchair-quarterback fashion on industry and artistic issues that the blogger may know little or nothing about; a tendency toward tempest-in-a-teapot outrage over the latest stupid move by the corporate publishers; falling into the hype cycle of PR because a given book is the new big thing and as "industry players" the blogs feel that they should be covering it; a tendency to overinflate their own importance and impact, etc. I was certainly guilty of all of this in my comicsblogging days. When I returned to blogging after my brief hiatus and started reading horror blogs and doing one myself, I remember consciously thinking how refreshing it was that no horror bloggers actually felt any kind of proprietary role in the horror industry, and were simply commenting on it from the perspective of well-informed buffs as opposed to the wannabe captains of industry who populate the comics blogosphere, myself included again. So, calls for a more concentrated horror blogosphere have turned me off.

But what Curt calling for is keeping the horse in front of the cart in terms of the importance of readership. He's not saying that we should have a horror blogosphere because of what we horrorbloggers could get out of having an increased readership, he's saying we should have one because of what an increased readership could get out of us. And I think that's absolutely spot-on. I mean, if you're a horror fan and you're looking to read informed, intelligent, and idiosyncratic commentary about genre efforts, you basically have, what, Rue Morgue and whatever decent reviews/criticism/essays you can find in the mainstream media. The online non-blog scene is pretty dire, and Curt's right, I don't think most fans really know about the blogs at all. It would be nice if people had an alternative to the big sites! And as I've said, Curt (who kindly attributes the genesis of this whole discussion to reading various things I've written) is quite right to say that a big Journalista-style horror linkblog would help shore up such an alternative.

But the problems with a collective-identity blogosphere I listed above still would remain, most likely. Moreover, while Curt's call for a linkblog with a strong personality is no doubt intended to stave off the kind of "hey here's the news on every single movie with a decapitation in it no matter how unwatchable" feel of the big horror sites and other qualitative linkblogging hazards, I actually think that popular personality-driven linkblogs can exacerbate the blogospheric problems I mentioned earlier rather than ameliorate them. The main difficulty is that points of view that seem unobjectionable or even noble in principle can easily devolve into sweeping generalizations or calcified thou-shalt-nots. Meanwhile, sensible aesthetic advocacy can make a clumsy transition into ill-conceived industry second-guessing--the kind of situation where people who note a particular creator or subgenre's quality go on to demand that the entire industry abandon whatever business models had been working for it up until now in favor of a new approach that benefits that creator/subgenre, or pleases people who are fans of that creator/subgenre, or simply shames those who aren't. In that sense, popular linkblogs can even magnify that tendency since their voices are so much louder, shaping the discussion both in terms of links they select as noteworthy and the commentary they provide about them. I mean, that's true of any blog of any kind, but it's enhanced with the clearinghouse-linkblog type of blog.

All that being said, I now find myself in love with the idea of a Comics Reporter-style link'n'news blog with an old-fashioned creature-feature horror host personality. We need a Web 2.0 Zacherle!

PS: I am going to try to enable comments once again, but this post will be going up while I lay me down to sleep and it's entirely possible I'll discover that the comments aren't working when I wake up--they haven't in months so I don't really figure they'll start now. But it's worth a shot. Just know that if your comment is in a moderation queue, that means my comment feature is in fact busted.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (3)