For my first post on blog@, I wanted to confidently thank J.K. Parkin, who asked me to do this, and kindly ask readers to be patient with the rookie, but then decided I should just fess up to the truth. This is intimidating as hell.

Last night, after waiting until the last minute to figure out how to post on Blog@ as I fill in for the resident geniuses who usually do this unenviable job, I found myself downright nervous. Interviewing clever people is one thing, but attempting to be one myself is a whole different ball o’ wax. The thought crossed my mind that I could back out at the last minute in a desperate attempt to save face.

But then a telephone conversation I had the night before crossed my mind. And at the risk sounding like a braggart, I’ll share that it was Geoff Johns doing the conversing, and the subject was fear, on which Geoff is pretty knowledgeable, seeing as he’s the guy who created a big yellow embodiment of fear and thousands of his fear-wielding minions for DC.

And as we talked about how fear can be disabling and how it acts as a constant barrier to new experiences and opportunities, Geoff pointed out that overcoming fear is necessary if you want to live life to its fullest, comparing this fact of the real world to how the characters he writes have to overcome fear in order to do defeat their enemies and triumph in their roles as Green Lanterns.

So as I stared at my computer screen last night and wondered how the hell I would find a way to do this blog@ gig without making a complete, unmitigated fool of myself, I figured if Green Lanterns can overcome fear as they use their power rings to fight the evil Sinestro Corps, then surely Vaneta Rogers can find enough courage to write something on Blog@. That’s honestly what got me to do this job — inspiration from a bunch of flying space superheroes. And if that doesn’t prove what a geek I am, I suppose nothing will.

–As you may have noticed today, we’ve added another blogger to our mix … Sami Ali, who has his own blog, Comics Crew. Sami will be helping us out with the daily stuff, particularly movie, TV and related news.

–Matt Brady’s given me permission to unhook the chains, so both Graeme and I will be out next week. Actually, Graeme’s out for two whole weeks … I guess his parole officer is more lenient than mine. So starting this Friday, Vaneta Rogers, who writes for the main Newsarama site, will be helping us out for a week.

Big thanks to Vaneta, and welcome aboard Sami!

–Since I’ll be gone next week and won’t have much access to email, if you have any news items you’d like to share, you can contact Kevin Melrose, who will pass it on to the rest of the gang to consider.

I’m still wiping San Diego out of my eyes, and here we are just a few days away from Wizard World Chicago. So, apologies for not getting this up sooner, but I’m offering the same deal as I did before SDCC … send me your signing schedules, exclusives and anything else related to Chi-town’s big weekend, and I’ll post them over the next few days. Or before the con starts, which is what, Thursday night? Holy crap. Send them soon!

And thanks to everyone who has already sent stuff!

Got several site updates for you today …

–Unfortunately we say goodbye, again, to Shane Bailey. As he announced in his last Meanwhile column yesterday, Shane’s moving on to another website. Shane already left us once last summer, but we were able to convince him to return to Meanwhile earlier this year. I’ll miss Shane and everything he brought to the site, but I’m also happy for him and his new opportunity (which we’ll post about once it goes live)

–So where does that leave Meanwhile? Well, we learned our lesson the last time we tried to do away with it, so it isn’t going away. Instead, Kevin Melrose will take over the column starting next Friday. And to give him more time to focus on Meanwhile, I’ll be taking over the weekly Quote, Unquote feature, which will run on Saturdays.

–And speaking of Saturdays, and the weekend in general, you’ll be seeing a lot more of us then.

Today we see the debut of two new columns — or, actually, a new column and a slightly tweaked column. Melissa Krause’s Point/Counterpoint has morphed into Variations on a Theme, where Melissa will highlight various opinions on a current issue related to comics. And Stephanie Chan will take a look at the strange and wonderful world of comic merchandising each Saturday with her column, Spin-offs.

And then joining Graeme’s ‘Rama Rampage on Sundays will be Everyone’s a Critic, by Chris Mautner, his new column on comic book criticism.

So if you haven’t been checking us out on the weekends, this will give you a reason to log onto the site on Saturday and Sunday.

It’s time for me to put the furniture back where I left it and bid you a tearful adieu. Like all good guests I must thank the host, Newsarama, for having me. A big thanks also to Kevin Melrose and J.K. for their invaluable assistance.

andi

Kevin mentioned the Crossing Midnight trade in Can’t Wait for Wednesday this afternoon, so I thought I’d remind everybody that Mike Carey is holding a contest where the winner gets a signed copy of the book. Go exercise your creativity and enter the contest.

I saw a thread over in Talk@Newsarama last night about how Newsarama was featured on G4’s Attack of the Show last week.

Cool, I thought. I’ll have to hunt down the video and post it, maybe give Matt some good-natured ribbing about being a TV star.

As it turns out, the segment was about comic book blogs, and one of the three blogs they highlighted was Blog@. You can check out the segment over at the Attack of the Show website. They mention that we used to be The Great Curve, then show a sampling of some recent posts, like a recent Point/Counterpoint, Kevin’s Paris Hilton cartoon post and one on the Michael May-written Kill All Monsters. They also mentioned us on their blog.

(For obvious reasons, I’m not really going to touch on the tragic death of Newsarama contributor Daniel Robert Epstein in this column, other than to say that he will be missed. There was a thread of tributes to him here.)

So, all the con news from last weekend? I’m skipping that because, well, you can find that here, and also because there’s so damn much of it and I’m already doing two weeks here. Gimme a break already.

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On the Eximious Press blog, Jason Rodriguez talks about Kill All Monsters, drawn by Jason Copland and written by Blog@’s own Michael May:

Jason sent me the opening scene. At the time, I was finishing up on Elk’s Run and ramping up Postcards - Kill All Monsters! was in a completely different creative direction then both of those books. But it was fun. And it was over-the-top and action-packed and still had some great character stuff underneath it so I figured I’d give it a shot.

We finished up the first issue so far - the pitch is going out shortly. I figured I’d share some pages with you guys and give you a look at my first little pieces of editorial insight. I like to do the quiet character pieces, sure, but I have to admit - with the right script I become that little boy with the G.I. Joes, setting up tremendous battle scenes in my bedroom. Except I curse a lot more now

…boldly going forward, ’cause we can’t find reverse.

Okay, I’m referencing a cult 1987 single by “The Firm” there, so if you have no idea what I’m on about, please feel free to ignore me. Or else go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE and have a pleasant if mildly hallucinogenic experience.

In the meantime, this is me. Mike Carey. And I’ll be your guest blogger for the next three Fridays, bringing you chat, news, pop quizzes and blatant viral advertising in a myriad (from the Greek : “more than two”) shades and varieties while you click at random hoping to find the reviews thread.

For those of you who don’t know me from a smoking crater, I’m a writer. Of comic books mostly, but I’ve also written some novels (my first supernatural thriller, The Devil You Know, gets its US release on 10th July) and screenplays. It was the Vertigo fantasy series Lucifer that gave me my mainstream debut about ten years ago, and more recently I started to write X-Men, which caused a lot of people to move me from the “smoking crater” folder into the “could be a comics writer – check discreetly while maintaining eye contact” folder.

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… or, to put it another way: Civil War creators download American Born Chinese while watching Heroes, New York Times reports

To wrap up anniversary week, I enlisted Chris Mautner to help me recap some of the bigger news topics we’ve covered here at Blog@Newsarama over the past year. So let’s take a look back at some of the stuff we covered in the past 52 weeks …

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James Sime and the Isotope crew threw a party this past weekend to celebrate the release of Matt Silady’s The Homeless Channel, which meant food, fun, booze and pictures of our own Graeme McMillan being photoshopped by Larry Young:

More details on the genesis of the above can be found here.

Also be sure to check out Matt Silady’s contribution to Isotope’s toilet seat museum.

(Many thanks, Larry!)

It was one year ago today that Blog@Newsarama went live … I still remember that day well. Matt Brady called me up that morning, and said, “Hey, we’re digging what you guys are doing over at The Great Curve; wanna start blogging for Newsarama? Take a look outside; there’s a truckload of cash if you’re on the fence and need some extra motivation.” Using my x-ray vision, I counted the cash and gave Matt an enthusiastic “Yes.” A few hours later, Blog@Newsarama was up and running!

OK, so maybe the timeline’s a little compressed, and the truckload of cash was as real as my x-ray vision … but yeah, it is the blog’s one-year anniversary. 365 days, 3,822 posts, 19 contributors (including guests), two engagements, thousands of song lyric references and countless controversies later, here we are.

We’ve got some cool stuff lined up for you all this week, like the return of one of our favorite columns from last summer and special editions of our various feature columns and maybe a few other surprises as well. Plus all the regular blogging stuff that you’ve come to expect.

But right now, I just wanted to say thanks — thanks to our contributors, who I’m honored to work with and who continue to impress me every time they post. Thanks to the guys over at the mothership who gave us this forum in the first place. And most of all, thanks to all of our readers, who make us laugh, think and sometimes even scream on a daily basis.

THANK YOU!

Cecil Castellucci wrapped up her guest stint here at Blog@Newsarama on Friday, and we wanted to throw out a huge Thank You to her for hanging out with us over the past month. If you missed any of her posts, you can check’em out below:

Q&A with Cecil Castellucci
Today’s Street Art - Lost Heart
Cecil interviews PLAIN Janes Co-Creator Jim Rugg
This Week’s Super Cecil Crush - Joss Whedon
Today’s Street Art - Knitta Please!
Today’s Underground Art - The Vader Project
This Week’s Cecil Super Crush - Superman
Two fave bookstores in my neighborhood
Cecil answers your questions
This Week’s Cecil Super Crush/Street Art - Banksy
Cecil saying goodbye for now

Also be sure to check out her other web stuff:

Official website
The Divine Miss Pixie Woods (LiveJournal)
beige is punk!

–Reminder: Guest blogger Cecil Castellucci is still accepting questions over on this thread; she’ll answer them tomorrow, her last day to blog with us.

–Per Jason Rodriguez, the book’s editor, the upcoming Postcards anthology has been pushed back to July 17, the same day that the new Harry Potter book comes out. Jason, who blogged with us some weeks back, also has a nifty contest idea related to both books’ releases:

Ok, seriously. If anyone can provide me with proof that they went into their bookstore during a Harry Potter Midnight Launch Party and asked for/buys Postcards, I’ll make sure that one of my creators gets a sketch postcard mailed out to you or we get you a signed book or something. You can still buy Harry Potter, but if your receipt says Postcards or if you go ahead and make a little film of yourself raising a ruckus because your bookstore doesn’t have any Postcards for its Postcards Midnight Launch Party, I will find a way to get something cool to you.

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With this Monday being Memorial Day, you won’t see much out of us until Tuesday. Both Graeme and Michael are taking the week off from their features, Can’t Wait for Wednesday will be delayed a day and Lisa’s feature, you may have noticed, didn’t appear on Friday … she’s at WisCon and will have reports from the show later in the week.

See you on Tuesday. Enjoy your weekend.

Welcome to the world’s newest comic book fan, Logan Christopher Hunter, born to proud papa and former Blog@ contributer Chris Hunter this past weekend. Congrats, Chris!

The Yeti. Bigfoot. Sasquatch. All this week, these legendary creatures will be hanging out at Blog@, as we join with Viper Comics’s Jessie Garza to present Sasquatch week!

This Wednesday sees the release of Josh Howard Presents … Sasquatch, a collection of stories by a boatload of great creators about the mysterious monster. Jessie will be guest-blogging with us, as he chats with some of the creative teams behind the stories. We’ll also talk to Jessie and Josh about the book later in the week.

You can find out more about the book at its official blog, and you can already order it from the Viper Comics web store. And be sure to check back later today for the first chat about Sasquatch.

In case you missed them this week, here’s an index to Jason Rodriguez’s conversations with some of the creators of the Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened anthology:

–Monday: Chris Stevens and Gia-Bao Tran
–Tuesday: Antony Johnston
–Wednesday: Matt Dembicki and Jason Copland
–Thursday: Phil Hester
–Friday: Stuart Moore and Michael Gaydos

I wanted to pass on condolences to Blog@ contributor Chris Mautner, whose father passed away over the weekend. Chris will be out most of this week for the funeral. Take care, Chris … our thoughts are with you.