Hi, folks! To those who don’t know me, I’m a guy who’s a bit of a comics appreciator. By “appreciator,” I mean to say that I’m not a big fanatic towards certain types of comics.

Rather, I’m more of a fan towards the medium – or genre of literature, if you will – of comics in general. While I’ve been a fan of animation since I was a toddler, I’ve only been a fan of comics for the past four or five years. Starting off with Fred Gallagher’s Megatokyo, I grew into a world of webcomics that I was happy enough to see expand into a world of equal opportunity for expression. The first long-form comic I read in First Year, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, remains to be one of my favourite books of all time as well as my introduction into the “graphic novels” medium.

The common idiom, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is magnified in comics where narrative, character design (both visually and descriptively), setting, and atmosphere are infused to create something appealing. Since the dawn of the first thinking man, we’ve been using images to communicate what we see and have seen. Many pieces of prehistoric art are made to tell a story, whether it’s a statue, a vase, or a bunch of neat scribbles on a wall possibly depicting recorded events of hunting.

In fact, comics theorist Scott McCloud argues that even historic murals such as hieroglyphs can be considered an early form of comics; they show a sequenced set of images that depict a tale. Although I follow McCloud’s work greatly, it was Ms. Clark that first gave me a link to his talk in early 2005 on TED.

My goal for this blog is to share with you how the world of comics stands today. Each week, I’ll provide items such as webcomic and graphic novel reviews and feature commentaries on how comics affect the world or vice versa. For example, technology is rapidly changing today and comics are being forced to change with the technology as well. These are but a few of the things that you’ll come to expect from me, so I hope you can all relax and enjoy a semi-academic perspective on the world of comics.

And I like pictures, so get used to seeing a lot of pictures here!