This Is What Happens When You IMAGINE ALL DAY

We're just sayin'...

Shout!: Creatively Speaking with Summer Pierre, Blogger

"But for now, it was easy to lay out and pour over the colorful pictures

and dream up my own stories -- of something that was still yet to come."

- from Comic Books

Summer Pierre's not specifically a comics writer or artist; she's not a comic book industry name but I don't think she intends to be, either. She's an artist, a writer, a musician, a Bay Area native, and a fellow blogger. It's quite by accident that I found her blog, An Accident of Hope, but it's a great name (like abbracadabbling) and I'm happy I did.

Industrial Vigilante:Shout!''s last (and first) blog featuring the quote by Grant Morrison captured his beliefs about the essence of superhero comics with words. But quotes just as meaningful can be found in photographs and drawings, too. In comics, they often are, whether from text and image or image alone. A story, or at least a single, meaningful moment of one, can be captured within the size of a small panel. And though it's not much, any of us who might look at it would certainly get the picture.

My first discovery on Summer's blog was her entry Comic Books. Her single image captures an anecdote of significant time, like a well-written short story, as well as conveys to her reader not just the joy of that moment but her feelings about comics and their role in the story. While she might have just written the story with text sans any illustration, making it a drawing frames and defines this moment in ways a paragraph alone could never do.

Words and image combined make a very powerful quote - Pierre calls it a 'one page story' - that tells of her passion with comics as much as it makes a statement about the power of comics storytelling. Take a look:

Pierre's blog is peppered with one page stories. Her Artist in the Office 'Zine is just one more example of so many that have resonated with me. Exploring An Accident of Hope was a fun and inspiring, and it's more than earned my bookmark.

I recommend a visit to An Accident of Hope for every abbracadabbler. Summer Pierre doesn't know the word for what it is you and I are doing, but she's doing it along with us -- and very well. We're all accidental abbracadabblers, by definition. See for yourself here. Also, Pierre's comics, 'zines, and illustration can be viewed at her Flickr page.

More germane to social networking than comics, I wanted to include a few examples of Summer Pierre's creativity with the blogging medium below. Being a new blogger myself, and someone who's in love with ideas and images period, I really enjoyed her Creative Blogging entries -- photographed attempts to blog using other forms of communication - other mediums - than just keyboard and computer screen.

Another excellent example of inspired blogging communication is the series I've excerpted below. It's A Message Pierre posted for her readers in 2007 for her blog's second anniversary. You can see the entire message at the link.

Thanks for the borrow, Summer. Like the X-Files' Fox Mulder would say, "The Truth is Out There."

Photographs by Summer Pierre

Mind Reading:With You in Mind

It's a known fact that I'm a column champion. I like the idea of columns sporting nifty, catchy names and regular, reliable content, a central theme, or that at least come from a certain point-of-view. It's sort of like having internal blog continuity, consistency you and I can count on and wrap our ideas around.

Mind Reading makes its debut right here, right now. I've decided that it's the perfect column in which to share with you my thoughts good, bad, and indifferent about the line-up of new characters that readers of Justice League of America, DC Comics' flagship super-team book, will soon be encountering in that selfsame title. (If I'm catching you by surprise, you obviously missed Friday's Comics PageTurner. Take a moment to read up, then hurry back to join us.)

My objective with Mind Reading is to, well, write stuff that you won't "mind reading." Objectively, abbracadabbling is a niche blog. The comics blogosphere is, all things considered, a ghetto in a vast and diverse world wide web of blogs. So I don't have to be a mind reader to fulfill my primary objective; I can safely assume that most abbracadabblers groove on comics, and if I blog about stuff like comic books or the comics biz, I figure most folks will choose to keep reading and see what I've got to share.

Am I right? Fantastic! Allow me, then, to make it official: Welcome to abbracadabbling, the blog with the column you'll never mind reading.

Formalities aside, then, it's time for me to address the rest of you here, our accidental abbracadabblers. To you, welcome visitors all, I know this isn't your first ghetto of choice. I care that you're a long way from home. I understand you don't know too much if anything about comics and superheroes and that all though you've read this far, you're wondering what possessed you to make that mistake in the first place. Am I warm?

I'll tell you what gotcha this far: Mind Reading is blogging with you in mind. The column is yours, amigo. It's here because you are. Deep down, you already knew that, too.

In my "inaugural" post, I mentioned that comics are magic. Abbracadabbling exists because of that magic and my desire to share comics' magic with all of you. Mind Reading, and another new column ComicMeme, will be those places on abbracadabbling where absolutely anyone can look at the world of comics through a different set of eyes. While not everybody's interested in Superman's New World of Krypton, that Superman's "S" is the third most recognized symbol anywhere in our world is a completely different thing.

I think that's interesting. If you do, too, I'm confident you won't mind reading what we've got to share with you in Mind Reading.

Next: Decoding the new Justice League!