Collected Editions has a new home! Visit the site at https://collectededitions.blog. Old links and so on should work, but please let me know if you encounter any difficulty.

---

Part II

You’ll recall that last year, parallel to a couple of high-profile API revocations, I also had trouble backing up this blog for a while. That resolved itself, but it reinforced to me an existential concern that, like all good existential concerns, I’d been putting off to worry about another day.

Fact is, this site I’ve put so much time into runs for free on a functional but functionally legacy platform that’s not being actively updated, the kind of thing a company looking to cut costs could one day trim with little notice. I might sometimes think, “Oh, that will never happen,” and then this past May both Pocket and Glitch announced they were shuttering their services on the same day. So I figured it was about time I got this blog its own domain.

The logic goes like this: However likely or unlikely, this blog’s platform could one day shut down. Now the blog’s got its own domain, though “having” something is only so guaranteed when we’re effectively talking about ones and zeroes out in the ether. But the hedged bet is that it’s unlikely something happens to both the platform and the domain all at once.

Which is to say, as best as possible, I think I’ve taken the necessary steps not to be dependent on any single entity for the continuation of this site. I’ve run the disaster scenarios; I know how to flip all the content over to Jekyll fairly quickly and be back up and running, if I needed to.

This isn’t reinventing the wheel; I’m not describing anything that someone running their own WordPress instance isn’t already doing. But 20 years in, I’ve taken the steps now to ensure that if something unexpected happens in the next 20 years, everything I’ve built doesn’t go along with it. That you can always find me, as it were.

My misgivings over aliasing the domain after 20 years are about what you would expect. “What about my SEO?!” But I also recognize that concern as a symptom of the larger problem. I’m worried about exerting some independence because I don’t want to lose my place in the recommendation engine — and that’s perhaps exactly the reason the recommendation engine wants you to care about their rankings to begin with. And indeed I’m well aware of the hushed tones I’m using, too; I’m not a fool and I don’t care to pique the overlords.

All of this has led me to be thinking about what, exactly, I’m doing here. I love it, of course; I love talking comics with all of you, I love thinking deeply about what books are coming out and what I want to get, and reading a comic and then going on to the next and the next without taking a thousand words to reflect on it would feel just too ephemeral at this point.

Then again, it’s madness, isn’t it? To spend this time, to do this work — it’s not my day job, there’s no great profit involved, no stadium tickets selling out in minutes. And to review not all the notable comics out there in the industry, not even big releases from the better-known brands (though sometimes), not even to review DC and Marvel books, but just to be a site reviewing DC trades (mostly) week after week? Talk about a niche!

This is a phenomenon I’m interested in, something I’ve been trying to notice and collect discussions of, to make my own sense of it. Entrepreneur Jason Fried touched on this recently in his blog post “Knives and battleships”:

But then I … ground myself in other professions, and realize how odd it would be to ask the same kind of question to a knife maker. “Hey master bladesmith, you’ve made a dozen knives this year. Same as last year. Same as the last 20. If you love metal so much, why not help build a battleship? Think of all that metal!”

Or a cabinet maker. “Hey, ok I get it — you take raw wood and you turn it into beautiful furniture. Again and again and again. Don’t you think a wood addict like you should consider getting into forestry? Imagine!” …

Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career’s worth of work.

I can think of plenty other examples. The vendors at my local farmers market who specialize in only chicken salad, or only salsa, or only pickles. The clubs for model rocket enthusiasts. Cars with ham radio call signs on their license plates. Blogs about a single character, or about what you’re reading or watching. When so much out there is about so much — the news, magazines, website publications — I’m endlessly fascinated by the work devoted to the niche.

Sometimes when I’m driving down the highway, I’m struck by the insanity of it all, a whole system built on the collective agreement to keep going, to not stop, at least till we run out of road. This is kind of like that. Comics is kind of like that, too.

Here’s to 20 years. Some of you have been around that long or nearly that long, and I’m celebrating for you, too. I expect to give the site a visual refresh coming up — I didn’t want to redecorate at the same time I’m moving house, at it were. There will be some additional content for the next few weeks from our expert guest reviewers, just to celebrate with something extra. And I’ll also be exploring some features for the site now that it’s on its own domain that might not have been possible before.

Thanks again. I appreciate all of you.