Does the internet really need yet another Comics Blog? The place seems overrun with the things. The truth is this isn’t another new comics blog, it’s just a new home for a blog that was a blog before there were such things as blogs.

Pull up a chair while I explain. Way back in the far mists of time when there was only one X-Men book and Batman actually smiled, I ran a small comics retail operation called FOREST COMICS. We sold comics via mail-order and at local conventions (we called them Comic Marts) in the south west of England. Why Forest Comics? Simply because we lived in the Royal Forest of Dean.

For various reasons, that I may go into in some future posts, the retail business morphed into self-publishing a quarterly comics interview/feature/reviews magazine called FCQ(Forest Comics Quarterly – another case of using the bleeding obvious).. FCQ’s only real claim to fame was one of the first in-depth interviews with an up and coming English writer called Warren Ellis, and as far as I’m aware it was the first place that any artwork from the “missing” Miracleman issue #25,saw print.

As part of FCQ I started a review column called… yes you guessed it…”can’t see the forest.” With the demise of FCQ and my move across the Atlantic the review column idea morphed into other formats and the “can’t see the forest” name was used on several comic book stores’ websites, on the Compuserve Comics Forum, in the Comicopia APA and eventually here on RevSF, where it’s run on over 70 review columns.

So what’s this got to do with blogs? During my time on Compuserve and as part of the Comicopia APA one of the most popular items I wrote was a series called “Comic Encounters” – The idea grew out of a comment a friend of mine made that I seem to see comics connections in something almost every day. So I started taking a note of them, writing them down and posting them on CompuServe, and in the APA, as a sort of on-line comics diary. (Sounds like a blog to me.)

When blogging technology eventually caught up with my inspired idea, I decided to move the Comic Encounters idea over to Live Journal, but that ended up being more of a personal blog. So I tried again and set up an LJ blog under the “can’t see the forest” title with the idea of combining the reviews and the odd comics encounter story. And there it has sat for the last 3 years.

After the arrival of the RevSF blogs, it seemed wasteful to be writing reviews and notes on my own blog, and then collecting them for columns to be posted here. Why not do the obvious thing and move my comics blog over here. So here it is.

This latest incarnation of “Can’t See The Forest” will include:
* Reviews (hopefully at least one a week)
* Comic Encounters
* Thoughts and Observations on comics in general
* And a couple of series I have in mind.

Come along for the stroll and I hope you will enjoy the view in this particular forest of four color fun.