Right now, we’re just about two and a half hours from the launch of my second annual Black History Month series, where I take every day in February to talk about specific aspect of black culture and comic books. It’s mainly focused on superhero comics, since that’s what I grew up reading and still makes up the bulk of my reading material.

While there are often interconnecting themes, I try to keep each post to its own specific subject. Later in the month you’ll probably see some callbacks and references to earlier posts. I’m not lecturing here so much as I am talking– I’d like to conversate about these subjects with other people. Smart question and stupid questions welcome!

Sometimes the subjects are specific characters, or specific treatments of characters. Other times, they’re more abstract- “blacks in comics.” I’ve got a loose structure in mind for this month, with the first couple of weeks being largely about what comics are missing and the latter two about characters or story arcs. It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course, but trust me when I say that there is a plan behind all of this.

You can email me here. If you want to see my previous posts about race and comics, check out the colored commentary category. You can find last year’s series under the black history month category. It’s okay, but it’s a year old. This year’s posts will be under black history month ’09. If you just want to read the BHM09 posts, you can subscribe to its RSS feed. Otherwise, you can sub to 4l!’s main feed. I’d suggest the latter, really– Gav and Esther are great writers and well worth reading. Enough intro, it’s almost time to get into it.

Last year, I did a series of posts during Black History Month, one post a day for the entire month of Feb. It brought in the hits, but didn’t necessarily generate a lot of off-site commentary, which is what I would’ve liked to have seen.

Regardless, it was a hard and enjoyable experience, and I’d like to do it again this year. I don’t want to repeat msyelf or step on my own toes, however, so I’m putting it to you– what do you want to see me talk about? Have book/creator/topic suggestions? Are there any dumb questions that need answering? Things that need to be talked about? Nothing’s too dumb or out there. Drop me a comment or throw me an email and let me know what you want to see. If you can link this around, that’d be great, too.