I started doing Fanboy Rampage!!! – which was kind of comics journalism, maybe, I guess? – because I was bored and had access to the internet at my day job, and that was a real time/place kind of thing; it found an audience, and when I quit doing that, Matt Brady approached me about writing for the then-in-the-process-of-beginning Newsarama blog. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I remember that it was Fanboy Rampage!!! that also caught the eye of Annalee Newitz, who was local to me at the time and we met up at some book reading she was doing after saying hello on the internets, and that got me an invite to io9 when that was being prepared. I feel like I kind of fell into it, if that makes sense? I wanted to write and be a journalist, but that all really started happening after I had done something that I didn’t think of as journalism at the time for a couple of years. Maybe there was something in my voice that people liked, or perhaps it was just that I’d proven that I could consistently put out content on a daily basis for a sustained amount of time. Who knows?
(If I hadn’t started Fanboy Rampage!!! when I did, I don’t think anything would’ve happened the way it did, had it happened at all. I think I really gained from the fact that it was the early days of the comics internet, as we now call it, and there just weren’t that many people out there doing what I did. There was me, Kevin Melrose, John Jakala, Alan David Doane… I’m sure there were others, but my memory is failing me. I remember it being more about message boards than blogs at the time.)
Because I have free time, I got myself a Formspring. That’s me above, answering a question from David Goblitz about how I got started in journalism, but you can ask me your own questions over here, dear reader. Part of me hopes that I’ll get asked questions by Tom Brevoort, considering how often I raid his Formspring for material for Newsarama.
Be warned: I will likely raid questions/answers for material for this blog.