Thank you, Mr. Deppey

Dirk Deppey's announcement that he was leaving Fantagraphics caught me by surprise. I've never corresponded with Dirk, nor have I personally met him. But as one of many minor bloggers who have been propped up by Journalista in the past, I'm deeply grateful for all the support I've received from him. I'm also very appreciative that Dirk was one of the few comic bloggers who exhibited an ongoing interest in the Filipino comics industry. There aren't too many writers whose attention encompassed so many areas of the medium. And I think that it's safe to say that Journalista was an important pitstop for many comics fans. His online presence will be sorely missed. And I wish him well in his future endeavors.

I'll probably have more to say, after his official last post. His departure raises many questions, not least being: What is the future of Journalista, the TCJ.com site, and Fantagraphics' own manga line? Hopefully, a few of those questions will get some kind of answer by later today.

Update:

Dirk Deppey has officially ended his tenure as a blogger at TCJ.com, and there's very little hard information on why he was let go. Dirk claims that the parting was amicable, and he implies that the reasons behind it were economic, although that doesn't necessarily preclude other explanations, like more sweeping changes in company direction.

As expected, the tributes have been sprouting-up all over the Web. They point to Journalista's role in single-handily ushering the comics blogosphere into existence. Noah Berlatsky describes how Dirk encouraged the nascent voices of bloggers like himself, and Sean Kleefeld explains how Journalista was once the most important source for general online news coverage in the industry. He believes that with Dirk's departure, more idiosyncratic and personal reportage will come to dominate the blogosphere. I thought that Dirk was never shy about expressing his own opinions, and this imbued Journalista with its own particular flavor. But I agree that the breadth of his coverage remains largely unparalleled, which is why his link-blogging provided an invaluable service to true fans of the medium.

At any rate, it sucks to be unemployed during the holidays. Hopefully Dirk will find a way to bounce back after some well-deserved R&R.

New Format, Same Combative Attitude

Over the past few years I've noticed smarter critical commentary on the Net, but it's scattered all over the place, buried in the usual mountain of frivolous, tepid, dimwitted, unreadable fanboy drivel. There's no single website you can visit and anticipate a range of interesting sensibilities on an equal footing, so one of my goals is to distill the best criticism and journalism we can into a single site. - Gary Groth

It's no secret that newspapers and magazines are suffering because so much of what they've traditionally done can be done on the web, faster and cheaper. We decided therefore to redesign the editorial and physical format of the magazine to take advantage of what print's best at -- upscale production values, longer prose, more permanent content -- and bring the Journal's mandate for criticism and commentary to the web with a vengeance. - Gary Groth

If the magazine's arrogance, whether a clever marketing ploy or come by honestly, wasn't much appreciated by publishers or talent, and often not even by most fans, it was the right approach, making THE COMICS JOURNAL indispensible reading for several years, and a bracing antidote to the sycophancy that by then increasingly earmarked other publications. Virtually nobody claimed to like the Journal, but virtually everyone read it.- Steven Grant

Among its reviewers the Journal has a contingent of solid, trust-worthy writers: Kent Worcester, Rich Kreiner, Shaenon Garrity, and Kristian Williams, but they tend to get drowned out by crankier and less-informed critics, writers who mistake abrasiveness for insight. The magazine’s review section does seem too diffuse and scattershot. I’m never quite sure why some books get reviewed and others don’t. There’s a lot of good critics on the web now – Rob Clough comes to mind right way. The most promising prospect for the next incarnation of the Journal is to recruit these writers (I know Clough has already signed on). - Jeet Heer

For me, I've been happiest with the Journal when it pursued other visions — Tom Crippen working out why super-heroes matter and why they don't, for example, or Dirk's marvelous shojo issue. The larger, bi-annual approach seems like an opportunity to go further down that road...I'd love, for example, to see what Kristy Valenti or Bill Randall would do if given carte blanche with an issue. Gary will always be the Journal, in some sense, but one of the things he's done right over the years, in my view, is to have the courage and the generosity to let other folks pursue their own idiosyncratic ideas and interests with his ink and his press. - Noah Berlatsky

Everything will be free. We’ll maintain an archival copy of the current website for our online subscribers — more on that soon, I promise — but the new site will have no “subscriber area” or special features that need a password to access - Dirk Deppey