I feel like, having hit 400 straight days of writing about comics, I should have something important or profound to say. But my first thought upon opening this document was that I didn't have much to say so this would be a short post. Let's call that Morrissettian irony.
I have applied to take a leave of absence from my grad program. My supervisor has a very lax notion of what supervision means, and my dissertation committee recently told me of their opinion of the irrelevance of just about every text I'm hoping to write about. It has disheartened me. I was under the naive assumption that a university English department would be a place where innovation of thought would be encouraged - unfortunately it seems that if you don't toe the party line, your contribution to literary scholarship is dissuaded. I'm not certain how we're supposed to innovate if no one in a department is interested in innovation.
So, instead, this year I'll keep writing here. Comics have a vast amount of important information to convey to us, be it through the narratives they contain or through the ways they communicate information to us, ways that are unique to this medium. As foundational elements in fan-driven franchises, they're also vitally important to transmedial storytelling, which is something I'm becoming more and more invested in - it seems to me that there's a conflation to be made between the transmedial and the mythic. And, in the end, I don't need to be in a university department, nor do I need the approval of the close-minded, to disseminate ideas that I think are important and interesting.
Oh. Today's BIONICLE comic was pretty badass - the Toa learn to work as a team, to value one another's input. Also, the Matoran make awesome battle mechs and kick biomechanical butt.
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