"Seven Hells!" 20th Anniversary Post

It's so very hard to believe that I sat down at a computer and typed the words, Seven Hells!" for the first time twenty years ago. It's been a while, welcome back to myself and the two people who may even see this. A lot has happened since I began and ended this blog. A lot of a lot but let's just go back to the beginning of "Seven Hells!" first. Can't lie, just typing the words "Seven Hells!" and remembering to add the exclamation point to the end felt incredible. It felt like April 10th, 2005 again. 

This blog came from a place of pain. I began the blog exactly six months to the day of my mother's passing. I was still mourning and didn't know where to put all of this energy. At the suggestion of a friend, this blog became the place where I found some healing. My heart may have been heavy but when i wrote about DC Comics, my heart became light. When this blog began, DC Comics was locking into its becoming a place of legacy, embracing its storied past while heading face first into new futures. At the time, I was falling in love with Geoff Johns and Rags Morales' Hawkman. I was all-in on Greg Rucka's brilliant take on Wonder Woman. I was doing all of this wishing I had a place where I could share this newfound wonder. Enter, The Blogosphere. In the twenty minutes before I'd typed my first words here, I had zero idea what a blog was much less that there was a whole community of like-minded individuals creating them. Names such as Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin and Scip Garling's Absorbascon immediately come to mind. They were a revelation. They gave me permission to write about this thing I loved and to be brave enough to share it. They helped me discover my love for "Green Lantern-as-Peter Parker" Kyle Rayner. This place was where I shared my love for all-things Lady Cop who, at the time, had only made ONE DCU appearance! She's even made a one-off appearance in the TV show "Arrow." Since then, she's had maybe eight more thanks to the likes of writers Gail Simone and Tom King. Deep down inside, I can't help but feel that maybe, just maybe, I helped move her needle just a tiny bit. 

For many reasons, I just sorta stopped writing here. Truth told, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. The comics scene circa 2007 wasn't overly inspiring to me. After the highs of comics such "52," "Infinte Crisis" and the criminally underrated Will Pfiefer/Patrick Gleason 12-issue Aquaman run, nothing seemed to hit like before. The dragon didn't really seem to run so why bother chasing? Don't get me wrong, I still read comics. I even enjoyed some but it just wasn't the same. Annnd…The New 52 did not help at all. The DC Universe, this place I'd found through the encyclopedic "Who's Who In The DC Universe." This place wide enough that to any given reader, Blue Devil could mean just as much to them as Superman meant to the world was ended. It was chopped down into 52 parts and the memories handed back with the promise of nothing. Gone was the triumph that was former Batgirl Barbara Gordon AKA Oracle. Oracle rose from the ashes of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's "The Killing Joke" where she literally and figuratively, was left for dead and given new purpose as the conduit of all information within the DCU. As Oracle, Barbara Gordon did what Batgirl never had, she broke free of the "Bat-symbol' and even became a member of The Justice League. 

For nearly four years, I didn't read any DC Comics. And it hurt. I remember standing in my LCS and staring at a DC Direct New 52-era Justice League action figure set and feeling... nothing. Nothing for these freshly reimagined characters who bore the names but didn't hold the history. My heart broke a little. While I didn't write for "Seven Hells!" anymore, I did write for others such as CHUD, XOJane and Bleeding Cool. I'm most proud of the one article about sexism in comics shops I did for XOJane and absolutely most proud of my work on Bleeding Cool. 

I knew going in that Bleeding Cool didn't have the best reputation but what I wanted to do there was exactly what I wanted to do here: I wanted to write the things I wanted, NO, NEEDED to see. I wanted to write from the heart and breathe life back into my love of comics. One day, I sat down and wrote as to why I wasn't reading DC's New 52 and... it kinda went viral. 

It was retweeted and reposted across all social media and even some pretty prominent creators reached out to let me know that they read the article and even agreed on some of the points. That article proved to me that thsi hobby of ours is, in a way, sacred. "Seven Hells!' celebrates this sacred space where individually, we can share an experience where men leap tall buildings, bullets klang off braclets and the heroes will ALWAYS point you towards the light.