Five Years Later

"If this means no more pop criticism, I'm all for it. No more low crawling self-important nerd's purgings."
-Gilbert Hernandez, 2011

Five years and two days ago, the first post on this blog--an excited review of Grant Morrison's first Batman issue--went live.

The initial intent of this blog was twofold--to entertain a girl named Nina, and to document whatever I was reading or watching at the time. Nina became my wife, and the desire for all-encompassing documentation passed. So the thing kept going, mutating. I started writing it as if there was an actual audience, even though I knew from the little "Overview" button in the blog's interface that there really wasn't one. Then--and I'll be honest, it still blows me away how quick it all happened--Dirk Deppey started linking to the site, and then Tom Spurgeon, and then Heidi Macdonald, and all of a sudden somebody was actually paying me to do something that I had only started doing because it was making this one girl laugh, and that was it. And yet, somewhere along the way, I fell for it. I went to Mocca and met heroes like Jog, Chris Mautner and Gary Groth (Nina loves to tell people that story, I'm content with just saying that what she calls sweet I refer to as embarassing), and I got the chance to connect with people via email that I'd only known from the blogposts of theirs that I was staring at and marveling over. (Sean Witzke was the first, but Noah Berlatsky was close behind, and David Brothers probably sent the best "hey there" email I'll ever receive from anyone.) And the people who I looked up to--people who I still look up to--came along and wrote under the TFO banner, all of them for free, and all of them so good it made me ashamed I was sandwiched alongside them.

And the blog got meaner, sillier. It was fictional characters at times, amplifications of real personalites, an attempt to seperate from the cut-and-paste websites that were destroying the individual voices that had attracted me in the first place that would sometimes result in convulted incest jokes and revealing slices of exploitation. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes it wasn't. 

Whoever you people reading this are, you've come here enough that I was motivated to keep going, and the gifts I've gotten out of writing these posts--the relationships they've given me, the place I now work, the sanity that TFO's playpen has provided--are ones that I don't believe I would've gotten without you. I don't know what else to say to you but thanks. It seems like it's so minor, and in the great scheme of things, it's a blog, so of course it is. But this isn't the great scheme, it's mine. You made it a great one.

I hope to see you around. We're not dead yet.

-Tucker Stone, 2006-2011

Comments

[Chris Jones]

No joke: Back when Comics of the Weak updated more consistently I would stay up later on Sundays just to start my week off right, and I still get a big ping of excitement whenever I see a new one go up. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the best comics blog on the internet-you say the things a lot of us only sort of have in the back of our heads, and we don't even realize how funny/stupid/horrible a lot of the nonsense we take for granted in the comics industry is until you point it out. I didn't, at least. I feel like I'm better at taking in and evaluating art since I started reading this blog, and shit, I don't really know if I could think of anything better to say about TFO than that. It's true of very few things that I read, see or listen to and this blog is among them.

Thanks.

[TimCallahan]

Thanks for a great five years! I look forward to many, many more.

[bp]

i only participate in the comics community at a marginal level and i read very little about it online. but TFO is a highlight for me. one of the few such sites i make a point to routinely visit. many thanks to you and all the writers.

[rikomatic]

Mazeltov!

[Chad Nevett]

Well done, sir -- and, of course, all who have contributed thus far.

[Ales Kot]

Here's to another five.

[Jacob]

You're pretty much the reason why I stopped caring so much about superhero stuff and started branching out (genre-wise). Appreciate the time you put into this thing.

Like the guy above said, here's to another five.

[Morgan Jeske]

Thank you for writing.

[Tim Hamilton]

I only reason I buy comics is so I can better understand your blog.

Congrats.

[Red Scharlach]

Please don't let this be an end. :(

[Mike Walker]

Thank you, Tucker Stone. Let's hope that Bert never finishes that baby.

[Matthew J. Brady]

Yeah, what they said. I didn't realize you'd started before I did; I've got my five-year coming up in a few months. But, yes, keep up the writing, hopefully more so than I do, considering my recent track record. This shit is fun, good times, we gotta get our giggles in before society collapses.

[Alec Berry]

No doubt one of the best blogs. Thanks for keeping it.

[NoahB]

What everybody else said. Congrats, Tucker!

[E.]

This is the only comics site I read aside from TCJ and Spurgeon, and has been for years. Tucker and the crew never fail to satisfy. Thanks for all your work.

[Uchenna Ikonne]

FIVE MORE YEARS!!!

[Pj]

Congrats, you mean bastard. You don't look a day over 67.

[Ringo Mountbatten]

Congratulations on successfully hiding your innate sweetness for five consecutive years, mister Stone, the blog's not bad either.

[Jp Pollard]

Congrats. I jumped on in 2009. When you described an ok batman comic as someone shitting on a plate, serving it up with a small piece of large intestine (but still shit, as promised), I knew I'd found the comic review blog for me. Look forward to it every week.

[David]

Good start bawbag, now show me what else you've got!

(Seriously though, loved this blog at first site, hope it never stops!)

[moose n squirrel]

Five years is a long time to manage to keep continuously blogging. Congratulations.

[Abhay]

Happy anniversary, and thank you.

[Sandy]

Congrats, and keep up the great work!

[hugh stewart]

i kind of don't care at all about comic books anymore but i do still care about reading your blog so, uh, there's that

(more posts about rap music, which is where i think i've put all the enthusiasm i used to put into punctuation and comic books)

[Arthur Robinson]

Came in late in the game, but I'm glad I got a great seat in the audience.

[John K(UK)]

You take it to Brazil every week, young man. My thanks for all the entertaining thought fodder over the last five years and my thanks in advance for the next five. The very best to you and yours. John.

[seth hurley]

I spent all day reading that post and then went outside and burned it.

thanks!