The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

We’ve all encountered the experience where seeing ourselves change in the mirror daily is so commonplace as to almost slip by unnoticed, only for someone else to comment on how great we look, “what’s changed” or “you look like you could do with a holiday”. Only the outside input stops you in your tracks to actually access where you’ve got to.

The FPI blog has had such a moment today with the news that it has been ascertained to place 31st in Cision’s listing of the ‘leading 50 blogs’ in the UK. To say we are surprised is something of an understatement, but we are all flush with pride nonetheless. Cision are one of the world’s leading media ‘intelligence’ companies – in a simple sense they provide information for marketing and PR people which will allow them to target audiences more comprehensively in pursuit of getting across whatever useful or fanciful message they might want to disseminate. It’s pretty unusual for something as specialist as the FPI blog with its primary coverage of Comics and some related fields to feature in a list like this. It made us sit up and realise that whilst from day to day we can sometimes feel we are ‘broadcasting’ to the void there are in fact many people out there reading the blog.

I personally wanted to say a sincere thank you to you all for following us, and also give my thanks to the team that keeps the blog moving along: Joe Gordon, Richard Bruton, Wim Lockefeer, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Rod McKie, Darryl Cunningham, Matt Badham and sadly no longer writing for us but much missed Katherine Farmar. And to Lee Eardley who helps to keep the show on the road technically.

I suppose we should now be looking for ways to ‘monetise’ the blog (horrid word isn’t it) – but the FPI blog has always tried to exist largely outside the commercial callings of the market and even the commercial callings of its own parent company. We will continue to cover comics with an eye to the art form rather than an eye to the commercial. Although if you are a publisher out there and want your books reviewed somewhere people may actually read the review, now would be a good time to stick us on that comp’s list – we could all use more free copies (as currently most of us pay for what we review) :-)

If you want to see the methodology that produced our day in the sun go here and you can read the full top 50 listing here (where we are in some very good company, including some of the Guardian’s blog).

So until the mirror cracks or Snow White-like keeps goading us about not being fairest of all we hope you’ll all keep reading and sending your input to keep it a lively and vital blog for those in the comics world – fan and creators alike.