David Chess gave me a word.
Actually, he gave me a bit more than that.
Two and one quarter years ago or so (roughly), something I’d put up whose traffic I was checking desultorily logged a couple of hits from davidchess.com. As you do when you’re checking traffic, I followed the link back and found this engagingly eccentric dailyish journal thing sprinkled with links to whatever had happened to strike his quotidian fancy.
I’d met my first blog-thing.
So I started checking in from time to time and through him met others (Medley, say, or the divine Textism) and through having become familiar with the general concept went on to find yet more without his direct help. And then back on 17 January 2002, I went ahead and started posting hereabouts. (Actually, it was over here, and I really need to clean that up, don’t I?) It’s been a year, I guess, though maybe what with the hiatus from August through November last year and the irregular posting before that, we don’t want to get too rambunctious with the anniversary talk. —Also, considering that I didn’t get around to writing this until the 20th.
I was suitably impressed, then, when he referred to linking to the Kip/Barry/Jenn ontogroup. —An ontogroup being a group or community that agrees on a similar ontology, or so it’s defined by Alamut, a member of Chess’s ontogroup. It’s a neat word, and I like it a lot, and I’m glad it’s in my vocabulary; it’s an interesting way of thinking about how you track thinking about the various groups you run into online and the ways they hang out and interact with each other. Barry and Jenn and I are linked, for instance, because we keep writing about how we’ve known each other for (yikes) a decade and a half, but that isn’t enough, I don’t think, for ontogroup status; that alone isn’t a shared ontology. It’s more the fact that we each take comics seriously (them as practitioners, me as a critic—and I hope by now you’re well enough acquainted with me to realize that’s as questionable as any other genre distinction), and even moreso that we were each molded to one degree or another by Scott McCloud at impressionable stages in our respective developments (for all that we’ve each reacted in different ways and done different things with that molding); that’s the ontology we hold in common—lightly, but. (On the obverse: I would not, say, lump Bruce and John and Ginger and Vince in the same ontogroup, for all that each can wax eloquent on the four stances.)
But ontogroups aside, for the moment: do me a favor and raise your glasses in the general direction of David Chess. To the extent that it’s anybody’s fault, he bears his share of the blame. —Also, be sure to read his post today: it’s an excellent example of his ability to take seriously something that seems whimsical and harmless enough—a sort of cultural reverse engineering that’s at once funny and thought-provoking.
So: thanks. —Onward and upward!
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Congrats! And, oh my, thanks for directing me to several other new (to me) places ...