Here's the Thing…

I’ll let you in on a little secret: My book, Ethics of the Fantastic Four, was almost a blog.

As I recounted here, it took me some time to settle on an approach to writing this book and how it should be organized. At one point I toyed with the idea of doing a large number of concise essays on very specific topics, like an edited Blackwell-style book but with much shorter chapters (and many more of them). This idea morphed closer to the Blackwell format, with a couple dozen chapters organized into sections, but eventually the sections turned into eight long chapters of their own and the book took its final form.

As attractive as I thought the “50 short essays on the Fantastic Four” format was—and it can work very well, as shown by this fine example—it seemed more like writing 50 blog posts, and if I was going to do that, I thought I might as well just turn it into a blog. And even though I did end up writing the book, I never forgot the blog idea, especially because there were so many ideas I had to leave out of the book to keep the chapters as focused as possible (and to keep the book from being too long).

So here we are: This blog will simply be where I talk about all the things I find fascinating about the Fantastic Four comics. I didn’t want to mention philosophy in the title because I don’t think of this as a philosophy blog, even though it is written by someone who is well acquainted with matters philosophical. In that sense it is different from my blog The Virtues of Captain America, which has a definite philosophical focus and purpose. This blog is more open-ended, a place to share my love of Marvel’s first family, although it will have a similar format to the Cap blog: covering the issues chronologically from the first issue in 1961 and covering other appearances when particularly relevant. At the end of the day, I want it to feel like one fan gushing over his favorite comics to other fans—and if you’re not an FF fan yet, hopefully you’ll become one after perusing this blog!