Blogathon 01: Good Morning Good Morning Good Morning

Good morning, everyone! Welcome to the blogathon. For the next 24 hours, I will be your host, Chad Nevett. Every half hour, I will be providing you with content in an effort to raise to some money for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a charity that fights for freedom of speech and helps out people who are wrongfully prosecuted because some still have antiquated views of what comics are. So far, $110 has been pledged/donated to sponsor me in this blogathon and, of course, you can continue to donate throughout the day and beyond. Just go to the CBLDF's website and give whatever you're comfortable with. Don't forget to tell me about it, though, either in the comments section here or by e-mailing me (my address can be found on the right-hand side of the blog) so I can keep track of the money donated -- and who to thank.

This is my second blogathon, I did one two years ago, and this one promises to be bigger and more crazy. In my first one, I discussed three Joe Casey runs issue-by-issue, so it was nice and relaxed. Not so much this year when I will be discussing Brian Michael Bendis's Avengers work along with a lot of books that relate to it. About 230 comics or so. I'll be doing one storyarc per post (sometimes the storyarc will get multiple posts). That's a lot of comics to discuss in a short period of time. But, hey, I've got 49 of these posts to fill up (well, 47 really since the first and last ones are pretty simple)...

A few things you should know:

1. I read all of the comics in advance, but have not written any of the posts. I didn't even take notes. I meant to but didn't. Oops.

2. I may try and work ahead a little bit to give me time to go get a slushy from 7-11 or whatever, but I will ALWAYS work on a post during its half-hour period. Last time, in a couple of cases, I did 3/4s of a post before leaving and finished it when I got back. I take the whole 'post every 30 minutes' thing seriously. This is meant to be a pretty constant thing I'm doing here.

3. I won't be using images in my posts, because I don't feel like searching for so many damn covers. Also, the images would just be covers at the beginning of the post and... who cares? If people do care, let me know and I'll possibly change my policy there.

4. Not every post is going to be a winner. In fact, a lot of them won't be. Nor will I get to say everything I want to or would if I were writing about these works the way I normally do.

5. Posts are being set for the hour/half-hour for simplicity. That means they ARE being scheduled technically, but by only a few minutes... better to be early than late.

6. I picked the Bendis Avengers stuff for a variety of reasons. It's quite popular, so more people will be interested in it. I wanted an excuse to reread it. I wanted to write about it. I want to figure it out. Why can't I drop it? It's a constant 3- or 3.5-star book. It's average to slightly-above-average in quality... why does it have such a hold on me? Why do some people hate it so much? How does it work? That's just a brief summary of why, but I hope that gives you some idea.

7. I was crazy and stupid to do this, but it's too late to back out now.

Enjoy. And remember to donate if you can. Coming up in 30 minutes: Avengers Disassembled!