Think of me, if you think of me at all, as that guy who would have written 10,000 words about Micronauts

I regret things. If pressed, I could admit to a great many regrets in my life. Not writing more about Bill Mantlo is definitely one of those regrets, as is the fact that I never sat down and wrote the post explaining that it was probably Roy Thomas, and not L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Jordan or Lin Carter who wrote the most important pastiche of Robert E. Howard's characters, and that the character we find in Thomas' run on Conan hews fairly closely to Howard's canny, feral but intelligent throne-treader. There are always more ideas than there are hands to write them with. I wanted to cover the first and second Micronauts series, and I never sat down and discussed the roots of that seemingly ubiquitous stock character, the street-level vigilante. And I could never figure out how to write the piece about Batman and his tendency to adopt people, which has reached ridiculous levels in the modern comic books, to the point where Batman is the Mike Brady of a family of angry costumed men, women and children.

I did not write these posts, and now the opportunity is gone, because I won't be posting here any longer. I'm leaving the Curmudgeons, but while I regret many things (including leaving) I do not regret having been involved with the site, or having written thousands of words about comic books. I mostly regret not having written more about them. No article comparing All-Star Squadron to The Invaders ever materialized out of the ether. My paean to Victor Von Doom, at times one of my favorite characters in comics, was never completed beyond a few paragraphs. My discussion of how E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensmen series inspired comic books from Green Lantern and Legion of Super Heroes to Nexus and Dreadstar sits, mouldering, in a file on a computer that doesn't work anymore. I never got beyond a few notes for an in-depth critique of Ostrander's Grimjack or his later, superlative work on The Spectre, and I didn't even compile the notes for the piece I could never decide how to write about Rick Veitch. (I'm sort of ambivalent about Army@Love but I still remember the incandescent power and perversity of his The One).

My posting here trickled down to a brook across dry sand, and that I regret. While I enjoyed All-Star Superman and found Seaguy wonderful and amazing, I didn't really feel moved to comment on them, or on much of anything else I read. Civil War frankly bored me. 52 was good, but it got plenty of coverage and I couldn't bear to read Infinite Crisis again to critique it. To a great extent, the fire has gone out for me as far as modern comics are concerned, and sticking around here to post reviews of Age of Bronze volumes just doesn't strike me as fun for either the readers or myself. Combine that with recent events involving sock puppetry and hypocrisy and I find myself without the will to continue, even though I know that by leaving I'm diminishing myself by removing contact with sharp, insightful people who know the art form and love it.

So here we end my tenure here. I've never been concise, so brevity now is beyond me, and I hope you can forgive multiple paragraphs when I could simply have said good-bye and have been done with it. I can but stay true to my roots, though, as a young man whose grandmother used to buy him the digest paperbacks of old Marvel comics published before his birth and who soaked up the florid, overwrought prose and hyperkinetic art of old Fantastic Four issues reprinted in those cramped little books as if it were pure injections of limitless light for the imagination.

Excelsior, true believers. Face front, as there's more coming, even if it's not going to be from me anymore. As a parting shot, I leave you with trips down memory lane, links to the entries I most enjoyed writing. Take care, and I'll hopefully see you again in the world concocted of colorful dots.

Posted by Matt Rossi at June 20, 2007 12:24 PM