online negativity

Last Wednesday I had a blog entry about the Diamond retailer summit and mentioned that the highlight of the summit for me was Billy Tucci's SGT. Rock presentation. I prefaced talking about Tucci's upcoming SGT. Rock by relating how I wasn't a big fan of his previous comic work. Whether I liked or didn't like Tucci's previous comic work wasn't really relevant to his great presentation at the summit and in retrospect I wish I didn't include that digression within my entry last Wednesday. Originally I wrote the entry with the digression on my thoughts on Tucci's previous comic work in an attempt to illustrate that I was wrong about his commitment to the comic book medium, but ultimately I think I just ended up contributing to the flood of negativity that exists online.

Since starting my blog over a year ago I've tried to stay away from negative entries about the comic industry and events as I see them in the world around me. This may come as something of a shock to people who don't know me real well, but I'm kind of a negative person. I try not to succumb to negativity though and try whenever possible to focus on positive things. I can't say that I won't have more blog entries in the future that have a negative slant, but I do think it's too easy to give in to negativity and thus instead of talking about all the bad comics that are being published or goofy things that go on in this industry, I made the decision to mainly talk about the good comics that do exist and bring attention to them. Certainly there's more bad comics then good comics, but this is true of any form of entertainment. This doesn't mean that I won't give my opinion of a comic that I thought was bad if someone asks me what I thought about it here in my store, but I will often preface my opinion with the saying "one person's treasure is another person's trash", not to come across as Mr. Neutral, but to illustrate that just because I liked something doesn't mean everyone will (although I have read quite a few comics over the past few decades so I'm more right than not (grin!).

Too many people will write / say things online that they wouldn't say when talking to an actual person on a face to face basis and will post things not really thinking about what they've just stated, kind of like letting one's id out without any restraints. Comic messageboards are full of mostly negative comments and if the people who just post negative comments would put just a tenth of their energy into promoting or doing something positive, the internet wouldn't be anywhere as noisy as it is.

Having said the above here, I'm not saying that blogs or reviews that are largely negative with regard to their content are not worthy of reading from time to time or that people making those reviews or statements don't have valid viewpoints because I do enjoy reading sites like Brian Hibb's Savage Critics (as they can be especially scathing and intelligent at the same time), I'm just not going to air my negativity out on my blog on anywhere close to a regular basis because there are enough good comics to talk about (and or other topics) that any negative entries I post would take away time I spend on the positive. BUT if McCain wins in 50 days, all bets are off and super dark negative Ralph will take over and I'm probably going to have to change the name of my blog to "Holy Crap The U.S. Is Going Down The Crapper, Man Am I Glad I Don't Have Kids!" I say the preceeding only half-jokingly and while there are those that say people shouldn't wear their politics on their sleeves so as to not offend any of their audience, I really feel strongly about how wrong it would be for there to be a republican president for another four years. Now I have to find a good comic to read to purge these negative thoughts from my frontal lobes!