If you’re one of the handful of loyal listeners to our Graphic Novel Book Club podcast, you may be feeling bitterly betrayed that you haven’t heard hide nor hair of it since we announced, a few months ago, that we were going to do an episode about Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s Local as our next one.
Er, sorry, basically. Circumstances beyond our control meant that we didn’t end up recording the episode on the date we’d originally planned, and following that – while discussing when we’d get around to rescheduling it – we ended up falling into an entirely separate discussion about whether or not the podcast was working or not. Listeners seemed to enjoy it – and thank you for all the good feedback we got, as we did get a fair amount – but the problem it had, as a format, was that the “Book Club” conceit relied on getting a decent number of contributions from readers. For whatever reason, this didn’t really work out – and we’re not blaming anyone for this, it’s simply that we didn’t really successfully judge how much time people would want to devote to joining in the discussion.
We could have continued the format with just the opinions/comments of our own, but we were starting to feel like just ourselves talking about the same subject for over an hour each time might have started to get wearying. So with that in mind, we’ve decided to quietly retire the GNBC format for now, and replace it with a brand new Alternate Cover podcast. This ‘cast will be a monthly comics reviews and discussion series – but we’re hoping that some of the things we’re doing will differentiate it from others out there, rather than just being a poor copy of some of the really good comics review ‘casts that are already out there.
(And yes, it does stand a far better chance of actually hitting a monthly schedule this time. That’s also part of the reason for the change in format, as it happens.)
The first episode of this revamped series is in the can already, and once we’ve sorted out some final editing and arranged the new hosting and feed, you should see it on the site by the end of this week. We hope you’ll follow us over to the new series, and enjoy it with us.
As for that Local episode of GNBC… well, we may get around to doing a shorter discussion as part of the new AC ‘cast at some point, or we might revisit GNBC in the future if we can come up with a way of making it work again…
