Phantasmic News: A Hamifesto
So a lot of people are starting online newsletters these days. I admit when I heard about this I was pretty skeptical that it would become a big thing in our social-media saturated online culture. However, a couple years on there's been a genuine boom in smart, well-written online newsletters, some of which are doing actual journalism (https://www.thehandbasket.co/ , https://www.wheresyoured.at/) and using the newsletter format to circumvent mainstream news publications that have increasingly been captured by the interests of the super-rich and right-wing ideologues. Perhaps less seriously ( https://1900hotdog.com/), some are using the format for media critique and discussions of pop culture, as well as comedy. It's effectively become a return to the old days of blogs, as well as providing a new venue for fun websites that had been increasingly pushed to the side in favor of the "walled garden" of social media. Others have written about this more knowledgeably than myself, but the decentralization allowed by newsletters strikes me as a very good thing, and the fact that indie writers can now monetize their work without having to bow and scrape to media gatekeepers--the indies and smaller sites having increasingly proven more relevant than some of the legacy media over the last tumultuous year--is something that might actually be vitally necessary if we want the online community to remain an actual community rather than a torrent of junk and two-second video clips.
(I will admit that, from the consumer side of things, I don't think we're quite there yet, as having to subscribe to dozens of indie newsletters is a strain on the pocketbook, especially when there's still a lot of good free content out there. The economies of scale and some form of consolidation is going to have to kick in at some point...which is of course part of what created the problem in the first place...but hopefully someone smarter than me will solve this issue soon?)
Anyway, there are a number of services and tools people are using to create their newsletters (including, apparently, good old Wordpress, which really would make this a straightforward evolution from blogs to newsletters). One of these, by all accounts the biggest, is Substack. Unfortunately, Substack, as anyone who's been paying attention knows, has become the proverbial Nazi Bar; without getting into the intentions of its owners, which strike me as (to say the least) suspect at a time when big tech is gleefully embracing white supremacy and authoritarianism, Substack is absolutely promoting white supremacist content and helping white supremacists get paid. I'm usually pretty sanguine about the tools creators and media figures may need to use to reach an audience in this time when the web is becoming hostile to independents trying to stay alive, but I literally do not see an advantage to using Substack when there are a number of fully functional options like Ghost, Buttondown and Beehiiv, none of which go out of their way to give money to Nazis, and of which Buttondown in particular has taken a firm anti-Nazi stance. Substack users can even transfer their readership lists to one of those other services, so there's no real excuse for it at this point.
Then there's me! I made a rough stab at a newsletter on Buttondown a while back--I'm going to post this there, so hi to the five or so people who subscribed--with the purpose of building a community of people who liked my work, and trying to give them some interesting thoughts as a bonus. The main purpose, of course, was to promote my comics and podcasts and send out news for when I posted something, and hopefully get people to join my Patreon, though I was working so much on the aforementioned comics and podcasts that running a separate newsletter has been seeming like a bit of a chore. Then I realized--Patreon serves as a de facto newsletter itself! (I'm sure there are hundreds of people who came to this realization years ago so forgive me for being a little slow on the uptake.)
Since you can actually subscribe to a Patreon without having to pay, this seems like the perfect solution. So: why not subscribe? I'll be sending out my thoughts on pop culture and other stuff--probably a fair amount of politics, as indicated by the above--plus regular updates on my life. I'm getting married, which is why the content hasn't been flowing quite as consistently as last year when I uploaded a comic every month, though my podcast What Mad Universe?!? has been updating consistently, with lots of early content on Patreon for subscribers only! If you want to read one of my comics without subscribing, Starforce Pentacle , my magickally infused comic about space wizards, is out there saving the galaxy on Globalcomix right now, with more updates to come (I produced it in rough form a few years back and am polishing it and making it available in the correct five-page-chapter format). My so far subscribers-only comics Dash Platypus and New Junk City are both available for a minimal fee at my Patreon, too. As I say, you don't have to pay to receive these newsletter updates but why not pay a buck or two a month to get comics and podcasts as well? It's good stuff!
I'll have the first "proper" newsletter out tomorrow, and another one early next week, both on TV shows. Yes, I'm very basic. Eventually I want to do some comics reviews too--the irony is that I've been pumping out comics without reading a lot of them lately, and the ones I DO read are mostly older stuff...but hey, that stuff's still worth talking about.
So, Buttondown Subscribers, click here to join my Patreon (once again, it’s free!) and get the newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/posts/phantasmic-news-134337366?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
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