4l! is sitting pretty
August 3rd, 2010 by david brothers | Tags: 4thletter is..., blogosphereJuly was 4thletter!’s best month, hits-wise, in the history of months. I’m honestly really happy about it, because we didn’t cover any of the San Diego Comic-con news cycle, we didn’t have any of those snarky posts that get a lot of hits (“This popular book you like sucks and you’re stupid for liking it!”), we didn’t ride any waves of outrage-based blogging… I don’t think I even called anything racist or any other bloggers stupid and y’all know how much I love to do that.
No, we had our best month by just writing about stuff we like, regardless of when it came out, and you folks dug it. That’s pretty awesome.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned.
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Congrats, there have been a lot of great articles. While I was interested in some of these books before, your articles convinced me to bite the bullet and finally pick them up (I now own all of the currently available One Piece omnibuses and most of the BPRD trades). Good work, keep it up. 🙂
I love that next-to-last line – especially “regardless of when it came out.”
Good stuff. Thanks.
I’ve not been commenting a lot, but it has been a great month to be a 4l reader, so thanks to you all.
Totally cool. You guys are one of my favourite comics blogs right now. Keep up the amazing work.
I really liked your series like 7 and 4×4 and I think that Ultimate Edit Week is pretty hilarious. Thank you very much.
I’m one of the many reasons your hits went up. I’d seen your site before, but somebody linked to it last month (from The Beat? CSBG? … can’t recall) and I started reading more closely. Especially dug the “7 Writers”/”7 Aritsts” posts. 4L is now bookmarked on my broswer, and I’ve been visiting regularly for a week or two. Congrats on a great site and some fine essays. Please keep up the good work for as long as it brings you joy!
We should be thanking you. You guys did all the work (and it was a busy month); we were just fortunate enough to get to read and listen in.
Keep doing your thing man. From one black comic book nerd to another. 🙂
Congrats on the hit count, hope it continues to rise! Got wind of the blog from Comics Alliance a few months ago, and have been visiting ever since. You all have a very intelligent approach to comics discussion, but remain extremely approachable and easy to enjoy. I’ve really enjoyed the
@Alex: Crapsticks, taped my touch pad while the arrow was hovering over send, thus rendering my thoughtful comment useless! Anyway, I was saying, I’ve really enjoyed the number series you’ve been working on: Artists, Writers, Series, Elements. Pretty inventive, does the countdown continue, or does it stop at 4 to match the blog name?
@Alex: It’s gonna keep going down to 1. Look for 3 _____ to start on Thursday.
Thanks for reading everybody.
Yeah, I really enjoyed this last month. I prefer to read about people analyzing why they like things than tearing down what they hate and often wallowing in negativity (when you guys get negative, you tend to keep it interesting and fair) which is why I’m reading this site and Chris Sims’ Comics Alliance work more and more and say, Dorian Wright’s Postmodern Barney less and less.
4thletter: Fun, yet still critical.
your gay
@P. Terrance: My gay?
@Gavok: Nah, I think he means mine
guys is that a real comment or some kind of in-joke
@Lugh: It’s from someone we know so… both?
I was gonna write a huge wall o’ text about how you guys were a big part of how I’ve begun thinking about comics in the past year or so since I started reading you (as well as other sites like Factual Opinion and ComicsAlliance), but I ended up going off on how much better comics criticism is than game journalism (if it can so be called), like how there’s more substance in a paragraph of a ComicsAlliance post than there is in the entirety of a 5-page IGN review that has to use fucking decimal places to tell us exactly how good the latest Halo is.
So I’ll cut it off at that and keep it at “Congrats, can’t wait to see what the future holds”.
@Jordan: IGN is a joke in yo town, get up, get, get, get down
@david brothers: I view the IGN Comics site much like the “new alternative” radio station I listened to in middle school; I still enjoy a song or two, but my taste has evolved into something much deeper. It’s a gateway site, and I wish that the taste making roles between sites like that and sites like this were reversed when it comes to influencing mainstream popularity, at least when it comes to the awesome smaller books that have a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining traction in the whole “Not Getting Cancelled” department.
I wish I could think off the top of my head of the video game equivalent of 4L! and allies. Maybe Kieron Gillen’s Rock, Paper, Shotgun?
I did notice the uptick in positive posts and recommendations, and I read almost all of them. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t take some perverse delight in the posts that trashed comics in the past, but reading too many of those makes me feel ill.
I also wanted to applaud the series of articles you’ve done over the past month. I feel David Brothers is the person most likely to convince me to buy something, between Pluto, Yotsuba, Jim Rugg’s work, and last week, Winter Men was staring me in the face, so I finally had to pick it up.
I can only hope he doesn’t learn to use those powers for evil.
@Lugh: Depending on how you mean it I might think it’s Gamasutra, but they tend to be more of a business focus at times.
On the other hand, most of my gaming news comes from a few key writers and not one main site, so what the hell do I know anymore. (Jeremy Parish love, baby)
This has been a great month for readers too! Keep up the good work.
I’m new from last month too. I started by reading your 100 best what if posts and now your RSS feed is on my bookmark bar.
Apparently your doing something right. 🙂
It’s because your writers are don’t shy away from issues of race and gender – a kind of cowardice that used to be popular and is now once again popular.
I look at pop culture commentary in general and so much of it is eaten by this faux too-cool post-leftism where those issues aren’t seen as “fun” or “hip”, they’re for 1990s post-structuralist lit professors to whine about, plus we’re in the post-racial America or what have you, so it’s like everyone’s agenda corresponds with the Republicans who want comics with swears off the shelves and we just don’t discuss those issues with feeling and without irony. In fact, we’re encouraged to shit on anyone who does as divisive and not prole enough and tell them to come back when they can express a genuine love for Jersey Shore.
That was the real sin of the whole Shirley Sherrod debacle, that the story Sherrod told about her and the Spooners is a real vindication of the uncomfortable progressive way of doing things, where you admit and examine your biases and hash it out so that the right thing gets done anyway. But the “left” establishment was laughably eager to get the whole discussion off the table, even though it proved them right.
4thletter! is where I can go to hear the words “black” and “white” and not have them accompanied by a million provisos and caveats. It demonstrates that the least “politically correct” thing you can do is talk about how racism is real and we have a long way to go in comics and elsewhere. That’s why I always come back, and always recommend the site to new and old comics readers alike. More or less, if you can’t handle 4L at least, you’ll never be able to handle what’s real in pop culture. So thanks for that, and keep it up.