What This Thing Is, Exactly.

Well howdy. I'm a linear kinda guy, so that's why I'm shucking convention and posting a backdated introduction to this blog. In fact, the whole thing is really meant to be read in first-to-last order, rather than the reverse new-stuff-up-front mode of most blogs, at least partly because this particular project has a beginning and an ending.

My name's A. Prosser, and I'm a guy who does comics. Sometimes I write for other people's comics, and sometimes I write about other people's comics. And also, I blog. The confluence of all this stuff lead eventually to "Fourth World Fridays", a series of posts examining, issue by issue, in far more detail than is healthy, Jack Kirby's Fourth World Saga, an ongoing meta-series of interlinked comics that flourished briefly at DC at the beginning of the 70s. Cancelled before their time, these comics nevertheless paved the way for all kinds of modern superhero tropes, particularly the epic game-changing crossover to which we're subjected seemingly every six months from both of the two major superhero labels, and represent some of Kirby's finest work. They're also really weird, kitschy, laughable and often awkward, and yet they represent a bold vision and a sincere attempt to say something through the medium of comics, that basically makes them perfect blog fodder.

As of this writing, I'm a little over halfway through the series. I started this new blog to house it properly, as my other blog wasn't really properly equipped to handle stuff like Amazon widgets...plus, it's kinda ugly. So this page can be focused properly and uniquely on FWF. Once I'm done with that, I'll probably do some other, similar analyses of comics that I think are worth hashing over in similar detail, but this blog will be a way of keeping it all in good order. I'll be backdating and filling in the blanks, probably, for much of April 2008, so if entries seem to be missing or screwy, I probably just haven't gotten to it yet. (You can read the whole series, as of right now, on the blog I linked to above.)

Ready, True Believers? Here we GO! GO! GO!