I wrote a thing, earlier this year, to basically argue to get hired as a full-time comics reporter at an outlet. It was, to all intents and purposes, a manifesto arguing that comics as an industry worked at enough of a financial scale to be worth said outlet investing in a full time industry specialist — something that also paid attention to the ways in which comics are the source material for other media and thereby worthy of attention and reporting that might otherwise seem out of scale with how big comics actually is, as a business.
It was a document that I’d been asked for; in fact, it came out of a conversation that suggested that the position — while not something that existed at that point in time — was a very definite possibility, with me being the person most likely to fill the position. In other words, it was a document that I was eager to write, and something that ultimately ended up being part passion project and part research intensive, figure-filled argument to demonstrate that I was very much coming at the subject from a position of authority. Which, not unintentionally, would also demonstrate that I was the right person to fill the position I was arguing should exist.
As is clearly the case, considering what I’ve been writing about recently, all of this came to naught — the position never happened, and therefore I couldn’t fill it. When I got the final word on this subject, I thought to myself, I should just post the manifesto on the blog, and what had previously been in this very WYSIWYG window was, indeed, that manifesto. Common sense prevailed, in the end, as I realized that it was a document that I might want to revisit and recycle for other outlets at some point in the future. Hence, this post.
I write this not simply to fill in what would otherwise have been a void of something I didn’t say, but to point out the value of keeping some things back for the future, just in case. Who knows what 2022 has in store, after all…?