Now, I know it's not true, but sometimes it seems like I'm one of the few people in the world who doesn't like saying bad things.
It's why I use "fish" and "eggplant" in situations where most people prefer more common swear words. It's why I got out of academia with my M.A. in Classics 15 years ago rather than continue on to get my Ph.D.: as near as I could tell, a large part of the program seemed to involve choosing a subject, then writing a paper on that subject that tore apart every other paper every written about it. It's why I'm a natural behind the customer service desk at the library: when folks come in upset about something the library in general has done, I'm perfectly willing to accept the blame on behalf of the library, apologize, and try to help them resolve the issue.
I'm a wimp, in other words. A wuss. A milquetoast, if people still use that word: comes from a comic strip, actually, one that appeared in more than 125 newspapers back during the 1920s, 30s and 40s but which few people today remember at all...
So how does a guy as wishy-washy as me end up writing reviews? Heck, I not only wrote for Tangent Online, a site entirely devoted to reviews of science fiction and fantasy short stories, but I was listed as managing editor when the 'zine first moved from paper to the web. I had one review posted to Alexander Danner's Graphic Novel Review, and he bought another from me before the site went static. I've even been pressed into service putting up little one paragraph reviews of SF and fantasy books that strike my fancy on the Circulating Book Plan page of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America web site.
None of which answers the question I posed above. Because the way I look at it, I probably shouldn't be reviewing stuff. Those SFWA book reviews, for instance: I only do write-ups for books that interest me enough to make me read them all the way from cover to cover, and for the most part, it turns out that those books are not the ones you'll find among the best-sellers of SF. They're usually not in the running for the Hugo or Nebula awards, either.
Robert Jordan's million-selling fantasy novels leave me ever bit as cold as does the award-winning work of Lois McMaster Bujold. Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton--two of the official "grand masters" of science fiction--I've started half a dozen books by each author, but I've only managed to finish one apiece. The books that Locus magazine raves about, I'll get a chapter, 10 pages, sometimes just a page or two, into them, and I'll find myself wondering what all the fuss is about.
In short, there is undisputed and demonstrable evidence that my taste in fiction is "off." The stuff that just makes me blink is popular, critically-acclaimed, or both, while the stuff that I like, well, sure, Cordwainer Smith and Fredric Brown are considered classics, Jane Lindskold and Dave Duncan sell reasonable numbers of books, I guess, and both Sean Stewart and William Sanders made the most recent Nebula Final Ballot--neither won, though....
Still, combining the disconnect between my tastes and the tastes of the wider world of readers around me with my natural disinclination to think badly of anyone lead me years ago to the following conclusion: if something I read doesn't work for me, it's more than likely my own fault. I'm not the target audience, for instance, or I'm just not smart enough to figure out what's going on or why I should care.
Which brings me to this section of the website. See, when the Daily Grind contest began at the end of February, I decided that I would read the other contestants' comics to see what was going on out in the wider world of webcomics: I'd been reading webcomics since 1997, had been writing and drawing Terebinth on various sites since 2000, but I'm always on the look-out for more.
I didn't follow through, though. Oh, sure, I glanced at a few of the Grind comics in a perfunctory manner, found a couple that I added to my page of comics, but I never sat down and paged through the whole group from top to bottom the way I'd originally planned. Later, I'd tell myself whenever I thought about it. After I've gotten more used to the whole "daily grind" aspect of the contest.
But now, the number of people who've fallen out of the running has risen into the double digits, and I still haven't looked over all the other comics! Excuses, therefore, have become a thing of the past, and here, I throw the gauntlet at my own feet in the form of an introductory essay. Because, well, it's an introductory essay! There's gotta be something to follow, or it will have been written in vain! I'll have no choice but to read the comics, form coherent--or at least semi-coherent--thoughts about them, type them up, and post them here! No choice, I tell you!
So use this link or the link below to read the First Essay and see what I'm talking about. Or don't; it's the World Wide Web, after all. The choice is entirely yours.
From here, you can go back to the Book Reports Main Page or move on to the First Essay. Of course, the Main Page for the actual comic is always an option, too...