“The World That’s Coming” is a phrase that comes from OMAC, a Jack Kirby comic cover-dated October 1974, which just so happens to be the month in which I was born. The idea that OMAC is the same age as me seems weirdly wrong, somehow; Kirby comics feel eternal in some way to me – I have no problem accepting that it’s 37 years old now, for example, but the idea that it was just 20 years old when I was in school, or in its teens as I was struggling with acne and puberty seems somewhat mystifyingly wrong in ways that I can’t properly explain.
It struck me, awhile back, that I am always living in The World That’s Coming, these days; not just in the sense of living in the future that Kirby was writing about in the mid-70s (OMAC is filled with futuristic devices and ideas that have come to fruition in one way or another) – although we’re in “the 21st Century,” a phrase that still feels like the future to me sometimes, more than a decade in – but also in that I make a large part of my living writing about technology, social media and the like, and so am constantly thinking about what’s to come (Another part of my living is made writing about comics that are months from coming out, speculating as to their meaning, their plot, their quality, the whole shebang). And so… The World That’s Coming.
The plan, such as it is, for this blog is pretty much a personal challenge: To write more for myself in 2012, without making myself crazy. There’ll be 366 posts about pop songs over the course of the next year – intended to be one every day, but that’ll slip at some point, I can tell, so then I’ll have to double up or whatever to get caught up – and lots of other ephemera, me working out ideas that I might use at Techland or Newsarama or whatever, as well as just… random things. Photographs, memories, commentary on whatever’s on my mind at the moment. We’ll see what happens together, I guess. Are you ready for The World That’s Coming?, as DC Comics used to ask.