{"id":3538,"date":"2019-11-14T19:27:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T19:27:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T15:44:39","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T20:44:39","slug":"remembering-great-comics-journalist-tom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/14\/remembering-great-comics-journalist-tom\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering a great comics journalist: Tom Spurgeon"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

It was with shock and sadness I read last night about the untimely passing<\/a> of Tom Spurgeon<\/b>, whose The Comics Reporter<\/a><\/b> website has been on our resource list here at Comichron<\/b> since day one.<\/p>\n

Tom and I were the same age, and both sort of in the second generation of staffers at the respective publications we worked at in the 1990s \u2014 him at The Comics Journal<\/i><\/b>, me at Comics Buyer\u2019s Guide.<\/i><\/b> The publications had long had a tumultuous relationship for a variety of reasons, but that had seemed needless to both of us. Our staffers were all fans of Fantagraphics<\/b>\u2019 output, and my first article sale ever had been to the Journal years earlier. Tom, for his part, saw us as all serving different audiences: we were the \u201cold school,\u201d while Fanta was the \u201cart crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with Eric Reynolds<\/b>, Tom worked with us to build a channel between our offices. When a headline-craving creator tried to prank the industry with his own death, our team at CBG<\/i> and Tom at the Journal worked in parallel to root out what we both suspected to be a hoax. It was a shot at all media outlets, many of which had grown too reliant on press releases and internet postings; e-mail interviews had largely replaced phone calls, opening up a lot of potential for abuse. Tom exchanged notes with us during that process, with the result that we released a joint story exposing the hoax from coming from both CBG<\/i> and the Journal<\/i>. Someone online responded that hell had frozen over \u2013 but the truth was that Tom felt that news was an important thing, not to be undermined; whatever wound up in print in our respective publications would impact the record forever. We completely agreed.<\/p>\n

Tom and I stayed in contact after we left those publications; my e-mail archives are full of our discussions of comics sales over the years, some of which provided answers for his TCR<\/i> posts. For my part at Comichron, linking to TCR<\/i> never required a second thought; his reporting was diligent above all, and I was not surprised at all to realize last night that he was the first person I followed on Twitter. Articles appear to be continuing to autopost at his site, which shows how diligently he worked ahead.<\/p>\n

He was a singular figure in the history of comics journalism, and a swell person to boot. He\u2019s already missed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was with shock and sadness I read last night about the untimely passing of Tom Spurgeon, whose The Comics Reporter website has been on our resource list here at Comichron since day one. Tom and I were the same age, and both sort of in the second generation of staffers at the respective publications … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-3538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3538"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6167,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538\/revisions\/6167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}