This is a guest post by Jon B. Knutson, Author of Random Acts of Geekery. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you owe it to yourself to pop over the minute you finish reading this.
So… I’ve been asked to write a guest post talking about how I got started with my blog, “Random Acts of Geekery.” Just how was it that I started off as just your garden-variety hobby nerd/geek, and then ended up writing one of the more eclectic blogs out there (recently, one of my readers called it “The Smithstonian of Retro Geekery”!)?
Well… there’s a few parts to that question. In one sense, it began in childhood, when I was just a young geek, into comic books, toys, sci-fi and monster movies, and other stuff… an addiction that’s sometimes waned, but always returned (often geekier than ever!).
In another sense, it first began in the Yahoo Group DC-History. Bear with me, this takes a few twists and turns to get there! The main purpose of the group is to post pictures of old comic book covers and talk about them. Now, when I decided to start posting there, I decided to not just post random covers… instead, I looked for covers that fit a particular theme.
For example… “Evil Twins” covers. You’d be amazed how many comic book covers feature a hero battling their evil duplicate (or maybe not)! Or covers depicting sports. Sometimes I’d even post “Comics They Never Made” covers; faked-up vintage-style comic book covers for books that were never published, but maybe should have (all licensed stuff, the first series I did was for comic book adaptations of the classic Godzilla movies).
I was posting these covers for a year or two when I decided, thanks to Tony Isabella (a comic book writer of some reknown, who in more recent years had been a columnist for several different websites and at least one print publication), to see if there’d be some interest in running a weekly column of these covers. I contacted the webmaster of World Famous Comics, submitted a month’s worth of sample columns, and waited to see what would happen.
While I was waiting, I happened to run the fans vs. pros trivia contest at Emerald City Comic-Con in Seattle. This was in January of 2005, by the way. One of the comic book pros who appeared in the panel was Tom Peyer, who had been doing his own blog for some time. He gave me his card with his blog’s URL on it, and I was inspired.
Yes, I thought, if I can’t have a weekly column, I’d have a blog! Filled with my random thoughts! And so, “Waffyjon’s Random Thoughts” was born. (Why “waffyjon”? Well, it goes back to the TV show “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”, and if you really want to know what “waffy” means, try a little Google-fu and see if hat i
nfo’s still out there! You may also stumble upon some of my fan fiction from the show, too!)
Jon and Krypto
The first day I started posting was February 11, 2005. I did an introductory post, a post about the then-impending arrival of my dog, Krypto (a white boxer, who was being shipped to me on March 2nd of that year by his breeder) - and yes, he’s named after Superman’s dog. I also did a post called “Why I Hate Microsoft” (which I’d written a year previously but didn’t have an outlet for… I originally planned to post rants on a weekly basis), a post on my daily routine, as well as an introduction to “Comics They Never Made”.
And it went on from there… I posted those faked-up Godzilla comics covers, more stuff about Krypto, a bit about me… eBay purchases, my concepts for the Mighty Crusaders, Krypto’s actual arrival, and so forth. Sometimes four or five days would go by between posts! Yet I was getting a few comments here and there, so I was reaching someone!
Around February, I started posting scans of artwork I’d done myself, as well as artwork of my characters done by comics pros… the geekery was getting there, but still not quite there yet! Looking back on it, I wonder how many readers stopped checking it out when I posted my own art for about a month or two straight!
Remember the weekly column I mentioned before? In May, 2005, it started running. So I had a weekly column going, plus the blog I was trying to post daily on. And I was still posting some of my art here and there, as well as talking about the then-new Krypto the Super-Dog cartoon… but the geekery took a giant step in June of ‘05 when I started posting scans of ads from old comic books! Although that went on a bit too long… what can I say, I was still finding my blog’s “voice”!
The closest I got to the modern day version of my blog was probably July 4th of that year, when I posted a bunch of pictures of Captain America stuff! And then on July 7th, I posted a bunch of Fantastic Four stuff (because the FF movie premiered on that date or thereabouts).
Looking over the posts from that first year, I really was bouncing around… there’s a series of posts about my making my own Superman costume by hand, talking about my then-upcoming wedding, and way more posts talking about why I missed posting for a few days!
It was probably after the first year of the blog that I really started finding my way around… although it was still called “Waffyjon’s Random Thoughts”… at least until May of ‘07, when I just changed it to “Jon’s Random Thoughts”! Although not too long after that, I discovered there was another blog by the same name - one that had a point of view I did not agree with one bit! So, that’s when the blog finally became “Random Acts of Geekery” (it’s funny, it’s had that name for only two years, but I feel like it’s had that name much longer!).
I suppose with that name, the blog really started to find its proper identity. Looking for new things to feature on the blog, since I was fully committed to daily posting, I started realizing that just about everything was being sold on eBay at one time or another… including many items that, while they may be listed in collectibles books, there’s no photos of them to check out! So, I began saving these pictures and posting them, and today you’ll find these photos showing up in my “Cool Stuff” posts, or on “Monster Mondays” if it’s monster or horror movie related!
I developed a set of 40-50 saved eBay searches that I check nearly every day for this stuff… but you know, the problem with eBay is, once you start looking at stuff there, sooner or later you buy stuff! For me, it was seeing Give-A-Show Projector sets for what seemed to me to be a cheap price!
If you’re not familiar with the Give-A-Show Projector, it’s basically a battery-powered flashlight made to be a slide projector. Strips of film with seven frames were inserted into the projector to show a short story on a wall. Most of these featured cartoon characters, especially Hanna-Barbera stuff.
The bug bit me, and I started collecting the things. For over two years, I’ve been collecting the Give-A-Show Projectors, and I’ve amassed a pretty darn good collection! And I decided at one point, “I wonder if my blog readers would like to check these out?” So I started scanning the slides and posting them every Friday as “Give-A-Show Fridays.” Since then, I’ve gone ahead and started a separate Give-A-Show Projector blog (at http://giveashow.blogspot.com), but they still appear on the Random Acts of Geekery every Friday, too! Since all this started, I seem to have become the US authority on these things, even being linked to by other sites as a reference!
I’ve continued to add other features, too… there’s “By the 10’s,” in which I show every 10th issue of a comic book title, in order to examine how the book changed over time… “Children’s Book Theatre” features scans of old children’s books that geeks like me would have an interest in (coloring books, too), Random Videos of Geekery (which are basically YouTube videos of old cartoons, commercials, and other stuff), and every Wednesday, I post some pages from old movie monster magazines and talk about how good or bad I thought they were! And every Saturday, there’s the “Movie of the Week” feature, where I post photos and posters from an old genre movie plus the trailer (if I can find it on YouTube).
And there’s other stuff too… every October for the past three years, I’ve participated in (and even kind of led up for 2008) the Halloween Countdown, which has over 50 blogs participating in each year, all dedicated to posting Halloween-related stuff every day in October! And this year, I’ll be doing my third annual “Christmas Comic Countdown” as well. And there’s other features that come and go, depending on what I have available to use.
I’ve actually got such a backlog of photos from eBay auctions that I started up new blogs just to use some of the “overflow” - I also have a Godzilla and other Giant Monsters blog, a Dracula blog, a Frankenstein blog, as well as blogs devoted to Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and The Incredible Hulk, plus in June these will be joined by “Coming Attractions of the Past” which will feature all the stills, posters and lobby cards for genre movies, and in July by “The Batcave Trophy Room” which will, obviously, feature Batman merchandise, and in August by “The Fortress of Solitude Trophy Room”, which will feature Superman collectibles!
But I’m not stopping there… once I get enough ahead on all my blogs (and all but the Random Acts of Geekery and the Give-A-Show Blog are already written and scheduled through 2010), I’m planning on introducing “The Comic Art Archive,” which will feature photos of original comic book artwork, a Mummy blog, and a Creature From the Black Lagoon blog! And I’ve also been strongly considering a “Saturday Morning Superstars” Blog which will feature YouTube videos of all my favorite Saturday AM shows of my childhood!
So as you can see, my geekery is pretty hard-core… but you know what? I like it!
This has got to be the most bizarre collectors Item I have ever seen (or close to).
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