I've been working my way through a pile of back issues that I've bought over the last couple of years, mostly from my LCS' quarter bin sale. In a number of cases, they're beat-up copies of Eighties Marvel books that are so damaged and mildewed, recycling them is really the only option. In other cases, …
Author: Tom Panarese
Personal Archaeology 32: Creative Writing, The College Years
Sometime during my senior year of high schoo, I decided that I wanted to bea writer. That's com ewith its problems and roadblocks over the years, many of which are self-inflicted, but I was a determined teenager with enough of an ego to believe that my voice was going to be the next big thing. …
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Personal Archaeology 31: Love and Heartbreak in Creative Writing Class
The box had been sitting in my office closet for years. And even years before that, it was in our previous house and apartments. Like a number of other things, it just moved with me and was forgotten. But unlike the piles of senior year mementos and old letters and cards that I found easy …
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Personal Archaeology 30: Notebooks Upon Notebooks Upon Notebooks
If you have been reading the blog long enough, you know that I have done a good amount of journaling in my life. You probably also know--or at least guessed--that I have a writer's notebook that I keep with me or near me. I write a lot of drafts in longhand because it helps me …
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The Legend of Kamui
I should start by confessing that I've ready very little manga. There is no real reason for it except that my comic book preferences have always bent toward superheroes and the manga explosion of the last two decades passed me by because of other interests. The Legend of Kamui, therefore, is probably the first real …
Uncollecting Update May 2025
As always, let’s start with the numbers … Physical Comics Read: 6 (48/89) Digital Comics Read: 0 (418/435) Trades/Graphic Novels Read: 0 (0/0) Books Read: 2 (78/93) Movies Watched: 1 (206/209) TV Shows Watched: 0 (52/52) TV Seasons Watched: 0 (96/96) Podcast Episodes to Listen to: 76 You ever have times when reading something feels like you're swimming against a current? That …
Leave the World Behind
So if you were online at an point in late 2023, you probably remember seeing an ad where Julia Roberts and her family were on a beach vacation and an oil tanker got closer and closer and closer and closer to the beach until it ran right up onto the shore. I never watched the …
Cheat Days
In my mission statement of sorts, I've mentioned how I work in a few "cheat days" into every year. They consist of two Friends of the Library sales, tent day sales at my LCS (usually FCBD and Thanksgiving weekend) and the Baltimore Comic-Con. Well, the first set of those recently passed. I only started going …
Return of the Abandoned Writing Projects
I've written about this before, but the other day, I was flipping through a notebook of essay ideas and notes and realized that many of them have sat unwritten for nearly 5 years. I started flipping trhough them--mainly because I was procrastinating on writing--and wound up feeling a weird range of emotion. Okay, that sounds …
Star Trek (DC Comics, 2nd Series)
The vast majority of my digital comics are Star Trek books that were ripped from a DVD-ROM a few years ago (thanks to J. David Weter for sending it my way), and I've been slowly making my way through all of them. And the DVD-ROM, which came out sometime in the 2000s, was pretty comprehensive …
The Uncollecting 