RSS feeds good, online comics better
RSS feeds are funny things. They let folks with newsreaders and busy lives know when you’ve posted something new, but they (either the feeds or newsreaders) can be spotty at times and you almost miss stuff. Take Gene Yang’s terrific responses to MySpace making American Born Chinese a featured book, an essay he calls Does acknowledging a stereotype perpetuate it?. It was posted on May 1 but didn’t show up on my newsreader until a few days ago. I’m still shaking my head that Yang’s essay was even necessary, as it addresses people who haven’t even read his book but are complaining about a character deliberately portrayed as offensive. (There’s actually a blog term for folks like this; we call them "concern trolls.")
Speaking of MySpace, all 22 pages of DC’s Countdown issue 51 are now up on the Comicbooks blog, as well as the first half of issue 50. MySpace blogs do have site feeds (here’s the Comicbook blog’s feed) so you can read at least partial blog entries without joining the service. The feeds are often tricky to find (you often need to be on the blog in the first place to see the "RSS" choice at the top right), but worth it if you want alerts on new posts.
I grabbed Vulture’s site feed from New York Magazine as soon as I saw they were featuring weekly graphic novel excerpts the same way many magazines feature prose novel excerpts. This week it’s Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon.
Were it not for Becky Cloonan (who has a site feed) I wouldn’t have known at all about Amy Kim Ganter serializing the second issue of Sorcerers and Secretaries, because Amy’s site doesn’t seem to cater to RSS readers.
One of the best things about having an RSS reader is that you get to save posts to write about later. Thanks to this site feed report, I’ve now closed four or five saved posts.
And yes, ComicMix has a site feed — stable but ever evolving, like the rest of this site.
(Artwork copyright 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)