This is the second part of last week’s post.
My journalism story began towards the end of my career in psychology when I was writing for a local town newspaper called New Brunswick Today. I didn’t cover that much during my time there, but I did go out to cover a few events and interviewed some artistic people.
The reason I stopped was because I was asked to write about the unveiling of a new town statue of Colonel John Neilson, a local war hero known about in town. In my investigation, I learned from original archived letters between the Colonel, and a little-known revolutionary war figure known as George Washington, that much like Hercules Mulligan himself (as glorified in the musical Hamilton), there were hints that Neilson was connected to one of the Revolution’s first spies. An alleged turncoat whose back-and-forths on both sides helped Neilson win his biggest battle – in what was to be a major victory thanks to intelligence from a mystery figure lost in the annals of history.
Personally, I thought that was a ‘real’ story. My editor at the time disagreed.
So… I left. I figured I wasn’t a ‘real reporter’ anyway, at least, I didn’t consider myself back then.
I spent about a year experimenting on what to do next, and after getting involved in my local writing community and through my friend Alison Baldwin, I got the opportunity to cover TV – an industry I was hoping to break into more as a studying screenwriter. I was hired by Bilal Mian over at The Workprint in the end of 2017. My job was to write reviews and find unique angles to cover the entertainment industry. I ended up learning so much more.
During my time at The Workprint, I rose through the ranks from writer to senior writer to managing editor over my six years there. I grew a following anywhere that I could, and along the way, I met many PR professionals, many of whom I’m still in contact with today, even as we moved on to different parts of our careers. Working there got me to meet people in entertainment from all angles you can imagine. It was there that I learned how the industry truly operated.
My time at The Workprint had some big highlights. I interviewed and spoke with a lot of celebrities, producers, and directors. I ran interviews for the SYFY network for a bunch of their shows and comic adaptations for titles such as Resident Alien, Happy!, and Deadly Class.
It was there I met most of my NBC Universal contacts, and would later, through mutual friends moving up in the world, be able to interview some comic creators from Marvel and IDW. I also worked with a ton of indie folks along the way in both video games, comics, and film while also producing over 100 episodes of The Workprint’s podcast focusing on shows like Harley Quinn, The Mandalorian, and all of Marvel’s TV shows that came out during the pandemic.
Most people have never heard of The Workprint. But over the years, we had such amazing staff. Andrea Towers from Entertainment Weekly, Nerdist, and Marvel was there for a stint doing entertainment recaps. As was entertainment industry data-legend Julia Alexander, who was there for a very short time. Matt DeGroot reviewed movies for us and is now a VP at Crooked Media. My friend Nicole Cukingnan, a brilliant YouTube mastermind, headed the video channels at places like the Associated Press and the New York Post. Even my old editor-in-chief, Bilal Mian, is now an Emmy Award-winning technology manager at Peacock. Small as we were, The Workprint was rife with talent. Despite being the face of it for years, I was really the smallest fish there.
During the pandemic in 2020, I began writing for a website called HeyPoorPlayer, thanks to an old coworker I’d known from my mental health work days. During my time at HPP, I had my reviews read by thousands of people on indie video games and even had some reviews pull-quoted on Steam, along with being featured on Metacritic. I have an open critic page dedicated to my time there. I also had one of my strategy guides for Marvel’s Avengers stolen by a professional YouTuber who scrapped our content – which I thought was funny.
My time there was also met with hate from the online community, as I had a lot of negative reception and even personalized threats sent to me for my negative coverage of Cyberpunk 2077 (which was broken on release for PS4, though has since become a stellar game). The HPP team was a motley group of gamers that covered indies in ways no one else would, and I appreciated what I learned from my editor, Frank DiPersio.
In 2021, I wrote for The Gamer and learned the ins and outs of how Valnet operates. They’re the folks who run CBR, Screenrant, Collider, and more. My old editor-in-chief, Kirk McKeand, who was a great leader, taught us the ins and outs of journalism standards. He then went on to lead the gaming content agency of Sports Illustrated GLHF. I also should admit that our best writer at the time, Cian Maher, became a writer for the upcoming sequel for The Witcher game for CDPR.
Seeing stories like that left a lot of us with hope that we were doing the right thing. And hell, many of the folks at The Gamer during those years have moved on to shake up gaming journalism. I didn’t get along with everyone, and getting pitches approved for listicles was a pain, but it was one hell of a learning experience seeing how the content sausage was made.
The following year, I wrote for IGN for a short stint of time. Though it was a brief trial, I’d learnt a lot from the legendary Kat Bailey. Why I only stayed for a short time was, if we’re being honest, because I couldn’t cut it as a breaking news writer. However, I must stress that they also threw me in the fire with absolutely no guidelines and 30-minute turn-around times. Still, you can’t win them all. Even if every single article I’d written was front-paged and most-trended on IGN of all places.
By this time, I also had years of convention experience. I covered NYCC, Pax East, GenCon, and more. I’d worked with talent and brands from mega companies, including NBC Universal, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount, Disney, Netflix, and of course, Marvel – which is what I think most people know me as… the Marvel guy that reports on their press releases.
For the most part, publishers liked a good chunk of my work… yet, they still wouldn’t hire me for it. I specialized in… pretty much all of it at this time: gaming, tabletop games, film, and comic books. You name it, I’d learn and do it, not because someone paid me big bucks for it, or even incentivized me to, but rather, to prove to the world that I could.
The truth is I love entertainment. I love its business, and more importantly, I love the stories. I learned a ton from some of the best people in this business, and I’m really grateful for these years, especially to those mentioned above.
At this point, my network of contacts became rather vast compared to most, mostly because of that kind of hustle. That kind of drive to be important and know what’s up and when? That’s exactly how I got a reputation of being a guy in the room, which I’ll say for Hamilton fans, is the metaphysical “Room where it happens.” You’d be shocked how many things I’ve been privy to that I stayed quiet on over the years… But I won’t say that here.
In 2022, I interviewed at Kotaku with Alexandra Hall and talked about the future state of cloud gaming and gamepass; how it was attempting a saturated streaming environment strategy that eventually would bite them in the ass (and it did). I was asked to pitch that article directly, but I ended up not because I got busy as the SEO content manager of a website called CultureSlate, home to the well-beloved Star Wars Culture podcast.
In my year at CS, I mentored everyone that I could as despite its size, we were mostly a team of newbies. Between our social media teams and my SEO strategies, we grew our user traffic 8-fold and were responsible for helping bring on over 1,000,000 new users. Mind you, I did this while running The Workprint, having my brief stint of a trial at IGN, while attending conventions all across the US in 2022.
It was only then, after all of this, that I finally joined ComicsBeat. Originally, I was applying for the managing editor role, something that most of my cohorts here don’t even know about. Heidi Macdonald is someone I highly respect in the industry and had known about for years, as I’d considered her, Chris Arrant, and Rich Johnston as the big 3 journalists in the space. We met in 2023 and hit it off as I told her what I could do. What I’d accomplished (all that stuff listed above). And what I knew.
Despite all of this, none of it was enough for job security or a future in this field. And to be quite honest, I don’t think I’ll be staying much longer, having felt like I might have wasted 8 years for little pay and no respect from your everyday person. Despite millions of hits, the connections I made, and the love from every company, PR person, and publisher you can imagine, in the end, I was always serving the outlet’s brand, and no one really had heard of me outside of the industry.
Most days, I feel that I am a complete and utter failure despite success in just about everything.
So yeah, maybe I’m not a ‘real’ journalist. Maybe I’m just a failure. Someone who tried to make something of his second chance and became a shell of a person in the grind. Maybe I’m writing this openly and honestly about it because I’m figuring out why and what to do next as I approach middle age, which is why I’m inclined to write this column.
Then Who Am I? And how it relates to Comics
I graduated with dual degrees in both Psychology and Sociology as one of the top students in my college. I was offered scholarships to Berkley, had connections at Stanford, along with had a choice of schools to study at that I’d been speaking with. But in 2011, after completely tearing my Achilles tendon while playing football with friends, I was bedridden for about 9 months in recovery, re-learning how to walk. All while the life of my cohorts had sped past around me.
It was there, sitting in my room while thinking about what to do about life, that I got into reading comics. I feel weird speaking about it now, but it was really reading “The Sandman” by Neil Gaiman for the first time that changed my life. That run and its themes about dualism, existentialism, life, and death, had all applied to what I had studied and specialized in learning throughout college; my years as a Teaching Assistant in abnormal psychology working for the existential phenomenologist professor George Atwood, and by proxy, figuring out some life-long lessons about what it means to live.
Atwood taught me the ins-and-outs of psychotherapy and humanistic approaches to psychology, having come from a line of descendants of thinkers tracing back to both Carl Jung and Freud himself (If you’ve ever watched the show “Lie to Me”, Paul Ekman was likewise, also part of this weird tree of thinkers – his studies on emotions were expansions based on the works by Silvan Tomkins, who was George’s mentor).
Anyway, being hooked on this sort of comics-but-not-comics, these adult graphic novels, I proceeded to read just about all of the Vertigo comics line from the 80s, including Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, and pretty much most of what Alan Moore had written of that era. Gaiman himself would become both my idol and my hero, as I analyzed and read every single piece of work of his writing. Every short story. Every children’s book. Every novel.
My writing style is heavily influenced by his, and its hard to mentally separate the two. My goal, up until just a few months ago when the news came out about the sexual assault, was to be the next Neil Gaiman. And the reason I’ve stayed quiet about all of it is because for the past 15 years of my life, I’d based so much of who I am as a writer on following my idol. But after learning some of who he is as a person, what’s been revealed, and how much sympathy I have for the victims (In my years in Mental Health, I’d been around so many cases like this, I will always sympathize and let the voice of the victims be heard) I can’t support being a fan of the person anymore – and to be quite honest, I don’t fully know what to do without that light, that goal in life, guiding me.
In that same era of re-learning how to live again and my Sandman-era obsession, I had gotten very into reading Image comics and read the entirety of The Walking Dead (death has always been a fascinating topic to me). I was also really into Deadly Class and digging what the company was doing at the time. Afterward, I read Fables. Saga. Preacher. And eventually, got into most of the mainstream big two classics had been up to. My comics knowledge is admittedly not as vast as my studies on film or video games, but of all the mediums, strangely – I find comics to be the least toxic.
Though no one taught me comics education at that time, I did end up taking classes in Screenwriting with James Franco (online, and yes, exactly who you’re thinking, and this was well before his own problematic problems came to light), comedy sketch writing classes at UCB with Melinda Taub, novel writing classes at Gotham, and eventually, comics writing courses, first with GloomCookie and Disney Villain’s author Serena Valentino, and eventually, with the legendary comics writer, Scott Snyder. Most of these classes were online or at workshops in New York city.
I’ll admit, I’m not the best in terms of comics history; I leave that to my very knowledgable cohorts here, but I do know how to analyze a good story. I know what makes money and where trends are going. Later on, I’ll focus a lot of this column taking look backs at some of these classic comics that impacted me. That said, I’m also announcing…
That I am leaving The Beat before the end of the year.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what the world is becoming. I am, though, despite having learned so much and being told I’m supposedly a very smart and wise cookie, almost out of money and am very much dependent on programs like Medicaid just to survive. Which I’m not sure will exist very soon.
I’ve blown through my savings chasing this dream of being a writer and a journalist, and all I seem to have accomplished is accumulating a list of contacts most people would kill for, but who only seem to want to speak with me if I do a thing for them. Despite breaking news of major stories out into the world, interviewing hundreds of people, and stressing the need for the community, in the end, I have grown bitter, tired, and am feeling alone. And I’d rather spend my time fixing that problem than anything else right now.
So yeah. This is the end of the road for me. To anyone who followed, thanks for working with me, talking entertainment, and getting to know me over the years. When the next New York Comic Con hits, I plan on making it my last as a journalist unless something big changes. Until then, expect some big pieces in this column as a bit of a swan song.
Heidi said to me once that she thinks I am someone who sees only the good in others.
I wanted to tell her that’s not true.
The truth is, I think we’re all fuck ups and failures. But I think… that’s beautiful, because it’s makes us human. This is why I can’t abide by ‘purists’; people who think they know ‘what’s good art’ while condemning ‘what’s not’ because the fact of the matter is it’s all subjective opinion. I’ve met a lot of people like this in comics while doing this job and while tabling and I’ll say now, openly to you: you are missing the point.
Truth is, we’re all error-prone human beings making the most of our experience on this planet. I genuinely think we should express that in the here and now with the time that remains. That, my friends is art, as a human experience. To say that we exist. A big F-You to the people denying us that right to be.
Anyway, that’s all. Next time, I’m going to talk about where I see the future of the comics industry is heading.
Just kidding. No, I’m not.
Next time, I’m going to address an open letter right here…
to Neil Gaiman.
Next Post:
Monomythic: On Neil Gaiman and how to get over your idols: a question, not a statement.
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