My blog is so old that it can drink legally in every state. So I decided to credit (or blame) 21 people (more or less) who facilitated that. Some I’ve mentioned before.
Won – Rocco, my friend and fellow employee of the comic book store, ran into me in the autumn of 2004. He asked me, “Are you reading Fred’s blog?” I said, “I don’t read ANY blogs.”
Too – So I started reading the blog of Fred Hembeck, the somewhat famous cartoonist with Marvel, DC, FantaCo, et al., which had started in January 2003. He wrote every day, or nearly every day, and he wrote a LOT. Eventually, I started emailing him with ideas for his posts. I know he noted Herb Alpert’s 70th birthday at the end of March 2005, and he credited me.
Tree – Mark Evanier, the guy who was an assistant to Jack Kirby, wrote cartoon shows, and a bunch of other things, appeared on Fred’s extensive linkage page. ME wrote a LOT, though not nearly at the word count of FGH.
For – I don’t know if I came to Steve Gerber (d. 2008) via Hembeck or Evanier. In any case, his pledge to write every day, which he stuck to until he got sick, was the final push to get to start my own blog.
Fie! -When I first started blogging, I was also looking at a number of blogs from Fred’s roster. A fair number of the bloggers seemed to be somehow connected to one Chris (Lefty) Brown. I got involved with a mixed tape exchange, OK, mixed CDs. The group included Eddie Mitchell, SamuraiFrog, Thom Wade, Johnny Bacardi, Mike Sterling, and others, including…
Cease – Greg Burgas, who still writes about his current consumption of pop culture, as well as My Daughter Chronicles.
The game show
Sen – So what would I write about? One of the topics, I suppose, needed to be about JEOPARDY, the game show I appeared on in November 1998. Six and a half years later, I figured I had better write about it soon. So I’ll attribute this angle to Adenia Yates (1908-1966), my mother’s maternal aunt, whom I would see at lunchtime each weekday. She turned me onto the game. I suppose Merv Griffin and his then-wife, Julann, who designed the game’s format, Art Fleming, and Alex Trebek, should get a piece of the credit.
Ate – As I admitted repeatedly here, my wife and I got one or two of those baby books, in which one is SUPPOSED to write down all of those milestones (first step, first tooth, etc.) that the Daughter reached. Well, I SUCKED at this. So I vowed to write about her every month on the 26th. And I have.
Nein – Ken Levine was a writer on TV shows I used to watch, such as MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, and DHARMA & GREG. He started his blog shortly after I did. He would solicit Friday questions. I’d ask some, and he answered most of them. He eventually started a podcast. At some point, he stopped blogging and limited his posts to podcasts. Those ended in 2023. You can find the blog – though not the audio for the podcasts – here.
The Times Onion
Tin – In the late 1990s, Mike Huber was involved with these community webpages, housed on the Times Union website. Then he was in charge of the community bloggers on the TU site. Since I was posting every day, he wanted me on the TU blog farm. I resisted for a couple of years, but in 2008, I relented. I wrote about that experience here; the TU community blogs died in 2021.
Leaven- One of the TU bloggers was Chuck Miller. He’s also an everyday writer. After he left the TU blog farms, he has lifted up other local (or local-adjacent) bloggers every Saturday
Too well – J. Eric Smith, once a TU blogger, is now in Arizona but still on Chuck’s roster. Among other topics, Eric writes a lot about music and film. He mentioned me kindly a couple of times.
Thirsty -Charles Hill, a/k/a Dustbury, was a legendary blogger from 1996(!) until he died in 2019. He commented on my blog almost daily, and I enjoyed the interaction. I’m extremely sad that his stuff wasn’t captured by the Internet Archive. I still follow my fellow Dustbury acolyte, fillyjonk.
Every week
Fortran – I came across one of those groups, an abecedarian meme called ABC Wednesday, where one participates with others, literally from around the world, in sharing a picture, a poem, an essay, SOMETHING with the various letters of the alphabet. It was run by Denise Nesbitt. My first post there was in October 2008 in Round 3, letter K. By the end of Round 5, I was assisting her. And from July 2012 to July 2017, I ran the thing, assisted ably by Leslie from British Columbia and others. Then, from that date until the end of 2019, I helped Melody.
Iffy- Arthur Schenck. I found AmeriNZ, a blog and podcast by a US expat now in New Zealand, via the demographically similar Nik Dirga. (How I found Nik, I have no idea.) Anyway, I’d comment on Arthur’s platform and steal, er, borrow ideas.
Cistern – I didn’t even know what a Byzantium Shores was, but I started following Kelly Sedinger regularly. Even my wife, who doesn’t read these things, knows that Kelly is the overalls guy from the Buffalo area. He moved the site to Forgotten Stars about five years ago. He’s a real writer who’s published books! HE’s a budding photographer! But he STILL hasn’t done a pie to the face in far too long.
Severed teen -Alan David Doane was one of those FantaCo kids whom I really got to know when he was an adult. Among many things, he convinced me that I could write about comic books on a now-defunct platform. It was challenging and fun!
Irwin Corey’s brother-in-law (really)
Ate teen – Arnold Berman was a kind of relative. Charlotte, one of his sisters, married my maternal grandmother’s brother, Ernie. Arnold’s fascination with his genealogy has made me more interested in mine, which has become a recurring theme on my blog. He died a couple of years ago.
Nein teen -Ken Screven – The legendary CBS 6 (WRBG-TV) newsman was a TU blogger after he retired. He turned out to be more pointed than he was on the air, which probably influenced me to be a little more direct in my opinions. He died in 2022, and I miss him.
Too Auntie – Steve Bissette, the great artist of Swamp Thing and a whole lot of other stuff, met at FantaCo in 1987, I believe. He was doing some horror art, and I did, among other things, the mail order and shipped out items he helped create. We fell out of touch, but reconnected when I found his blog in 2008, which I wrote about here.
Too Auntie One – Amy Barlow Liberatore is Sharp Little Pencil, a blogger from near my hometown of Binghamton, NY.