In his latest “Everyone’s a Critic” column for Blog@Newsarama, Chris Mautner throws down an interesting gauntlet:
“Still, it seems as though many comics critics/bloggers (croggers?) are stuck in the now, and not providing enough of a critical reasessment of past artists and books. I’d like to see more of the latter. I want someone to make me jump out of my chair, into my car and go pouring through the back bins of my local shop. I want an excuse to go vainly searching through Alibris.
“With that in mind, I have a proposal. Sometime within the month of October, I want you, assuming you blog about comics regularly, or hell, even if you don’t, to write about a long-lost comic book, series, graphic novel, artist, writer or whatever that you feel is criminally underrated or ignored (preferably the latter). The more obscure the better. Genre doesn’t matter, nor does if the book comes from your collection or not, though I would like to see folks pick something a little out of their comfort zones for this.”
Sounds like fun. I’d even be willing to host pieces from the blogless if there’s an obscure/underappreciated comic they’d like to tout.