About... Revisited

My initial attempt at defining this blog left something to be desired, but to be fair, I hardly knew what I was getting into. Now, with a couple of weeks and a smattering of posts behind me, I've figured out some ground rules.

1. No spoilers. I hate spoilers. The problem with reviews that contain spoilers is that, if you don't want to ruin the surprise, the review becomes essentially useless. Even if you can skip a well-marked ****SPOILER**** paragraph, the rest of the review will often allude to the spoiler as if you hadn't. It takes a lot of effort to craft a review that can be read on two different levels, and I'd rather just avoid the problem. Besides, these are meant to be quick reviews, not in-depth analyses; there should be no need for spoiler-level detail.
   
   That said, there is one time I might include such detail, and that's when I think the story is so bad, or the surprises so lame, that nothing is really spoiled. That should only ever happen in, for instance, reviews with a 1-point rating.
   
   In general, I'll try to avoid giving away much story at all (spoiler or not), and stick to more high-level concept or plot points.


2. No cruft. This site is about reviews (and soapbox rants, which are really just reviews of more general, industry-wide issues), so there won't be "filler" posts with things like announcements of new or upcoming releases, discussions of industry gossip, or collections of links to other blogs. That kind of information is already available in a million other places -- some of the sites I provide in my "Blogs I Read" sidebar may even have that material -- so there's no need for me to duplicate it. I'm going to concentrate on original content, so if it's not in the context of a review, it won't appear on this blog.


3. Mostly comics. I can read probably ten comics in the time it takes to watch an average movie, and many, many more in the time it takes to read a regular book, so it just follows that I'll have more comics to review than other stuff. So while my initial intent was to create a general entertainment/media review blog, I think it's reasonable to say it's really a comic book blog. But I still hope to throw in an occasional movie, book, or who-knows-what-kind-of review to spice things up.


4. Mostly block reviews. Unless an issue is a self-contained story, I prefer to review blocks of books that go together. This is mainly to avoid jumping the gun and recommending something that looks promising, but fizzles quickly. Also, it often takes a couple issues to really see what a story is about or where it's going, especially on new series with a lot of introductory material. And as I mentioned in a previous post, I'm never as up-to-date on my entertainment as I would like to be, so I might not have even read the whole block until just before I post about it.
   
   Then again, I don't want to wait so long to review something that the older issues can no longer be found, so I won't have a blanket policy of, for instance, only reviewing story arcs or mini-series when they are complete. Two to four issues seems about right (although initially I'll probably have more large blocks, since I'm including a lot of material from before I even started this blog).