So long, farewell, arrivaderci, goodbye.

I was sitting at the radio station on Monday night, engineering a local high school basketball game, and scrolling through my Twitter feed when I saw this announcement. Dirk Deppey, who edited The Comics Journal for a while and before that, helped foster the Comics Blogosphere as we know it today and has been operating one of the few absolutely essential linkblogs for a long time now, has been laid off from Fantagraphics, which means no more ¡Journalista! with him at the helm, anyway. This is a sad day.

Now, I hear you say "Wait! Dave, weren't you the one who was always bitching about Dirk and how he never linked to your blog posts when you were trying to make your voice heard? Wha hoppen? Why are you being so nice all of a sudden?"

Well, that's true. I did do that. I felt like I was being unjustly ignored, and in my usual passive-aggressive fashion, I decided I'd just bitch about it, mention it in passing in the odd post, and move on. Eventually, though, earlier this year Deppey addressed that very issue, tempest in a teapot that it was, and we kissed and made up. Or something like that. Anyway, by then I had pretty much stopped worrying about it anyway, so it was all good.

Funny thing is, even in the height of my feel-so-slighted period, I continued to check out ¡Journalista! on a regular basis, because it was always a place where I could find something of interest, even if it wasn't me. And if memory serves, waaaay back in '03 or so, in the Paleozoic Era of comics blogging, a link from Dirk to me (a Super-Hip thing, I believe) was one of the first indications to me that there was even such a thing as a dedicated group of people who devote their newfangled weblog things to writing about comic books. So believe me when I tell you that even if Fantagraphics decides to carry on with someone else doing the work for significantly less pay or even free, it won't be the same, because his writing voice will be missing. With so many things from even less than ten years ago changing, and not always for the best, all the time...well, that's not such a good thing.

So anyway, I've already expressed good wishes to Mr. Deppey via Twitter, that very night even, so at the risk of being redundant I'll just take a minute to say best of luck to you, sir, in future endeavors, be they comics-related or not, and I'm sure you will go on to better things in the future. And thanks for the links I did get.