Bleeding Cool

I received an email from erstwhile Comic Book Resources rumourmonger Rich Johnston, inviting me to check out "his" new blogsite, Bleeding Cool, and share my thoughts. For the record, I've met Rich once before, like him and his work, and wish him nothing but the best. That said, I was underwhelmed with the site, but it's not past fixing.

Now, putting aside the fact that none of the stories mentioned in the email were easily found on the site, due to constant updating with other little newsbits and rumours, the design of the site itself is fairly pedestrian. It's not ugly (like CBR), but it's also no different than one might have seen at the start of this decade. I'm not terribly concerned about site design, but when you call something Bleeding Cool, you're asking for a touch more scrutiny on that front.

So the "bleeding cool" part must be the content? Well, while Rich is as good as it gets as far as coming up with the skinny on comics industry happenings, I think the strength of his column, Lying in the Gutters, had something to do with being a lot of short pieces all together, with a bit of structure and rhythm to it. What he's doing here is putting up a new item every time it's written, which I understand is meant to convey that something is always changing on the site, but unfortunately it also serves to put more pressure on each piece. And they're okay, but so far lacking some of the detail and quotes of some of his better pieces. It's tough, starting a site, because one feels a real urge to try to fill every corner with Content! Content! Content! all the time, and that sometimes overtakes the quality. Also, Rich has broken out regular Gutters features like Swipe File into their own separate thing, alongside "Manchild," which seems to be about adult men buying toys, speculating on comics, etc., and Celebrity Comix Pullbox, a misleading feature which imagines what comics might appeal to people like David Bowie or recent Britain's Got Talent sensation Susan Boyle.

The regular columns are written by comics (and other media) writers Warren Ellis and Adi Tantimedh. Ellis' first Do Anything column didn't get up to much besides some Thompsonesque grumbling and colorful imagery, but it's good fun. Tantimedh starts his column out as a kind of mission statement, where over the rest of the columns he'll apparently be looking at how comics properties are turned into movies, promising looks at a couple recent ones next time. And that's cool, I'm there. But I have to say, I always think it's risky to start out small, with the first column being "here's what I'm going to do...next time." For a lot of readers, unfortunately, they may not give you a next time. You have to give them a little more at the start. Tantimedh's a good writer, and I remember his work back to some short stories recommended in old Steven Grant columns, but I would probably have made the intro a little shorter and then dove into one of the movies, maybe getting through half or a third of it and then doing the rest in the next column, giving people enough here but also a reason to come back.

Earlier, I put scare quotes around "his," and what I meant is that it turns out Avatar Publishing (one of Ellis' publishing homes), owns the site. And that's fine; there aren't too many comics sites and blogs that don't have some sort of publisher advertising, and the journalistic line is easy to blur in those cases. Which is why you get non-critic Rich giving a sort of review of Ellis' Avatar book, Anna Mercury, in such a way that it's hard to tell if he really liked it or was just compelled to be as nice as possible. And the book may be great; I'm just saying it's a tough position to be in, and I would think Rich knows that some people will take his reviews and any other comments on Avatar with a grain of salt now, given that he's now being compensated by them.

So what do I think of the site? Well, it's okay. I imagine people who like what Rich does will easily follow him over here. He's the lead writer but his strength is in coming up with items, not necessarily having a strong voice to build a site around. Ellis has that voice but he's so far not writing anything he wasn't doing ten years ago, and anyway he's busy writing fiction and/or has other forums to really let loose or take over. Tantimedh's column is the only thing a little different on the comics blog landscape, in that he's got experience in both comics and film, but isn't that well-known in either and can probably afford to be a little more candid. We'll see. The Bleeding Cool part is still a bit of an irritant, in that for all their strengths these guys aren't bleeding cool/cutting edge anything. These are all guys somewhere around 40, right? There's nothing radical or edgy going on here, so maybe it's best to just sort of ignore the name and just hope that things progress and gel as the weeks go by, columns hit a rhythm, maybe more features are attempted and others dropped, maybe a new voice or two is added. Hell, I wrote for a MoviePoopShoot.com years ago, so maybe I shouldn't be so hung up on Bleeding Cool. Good luck to them.