When Amanda and I got back from San Diego Comic-Con in July, 2011, we were both kinda at loose ends. Amanda had just been turned down for a promotion for the second time, and I was in a new day job that I hated so much that, when a minor earthquake hit Boston just a month later, I fled the building as soon as I felt the floor shake without telling anyone, secretly hoping that an aftershock would knock the building to the ground, killing all my co-workers and forcing me to find some, any, better gig.
It was in the days after we got home from SDCC that Amanda suggested that maybe we could start a comics podcast, leveraging our knowledge in our favorite hobby, so at least we felt we were doing something that wasn’t a terrible day job. The idea was awesome at its face – I had worked in radio in the past, and Amanda and I had both worked as stand-up comedians, so talking into a mike to entertain strangers wasn’t a foreign or scary idea – but we had no equipment to record a podcast, nor a place on the Internet to host one.
After about a month and a half, Amanda convinced me to stake out some Internet real estate to host the show, and Crisis On Infinite Midlives was born. When we launched, we still didn’t have podcasting equipment, so we decided to start out as a regular comics Web site.
And at the start, it was awesome. We both had the benefit of working jobs we didn’t care about, so we could write two or three articles a day. And while eventually we did get some gear to record podcasts, it turned out that the process we’d chosen to be more than onerous: we’d record the thing while half-drunk, then immediately listen to it while totally drunk to see if it was any good, and then anally edit out every pause and cough before releasing it. It meant that every one hour show required me to listen to the horrifying sound of my own voice for another three or four hours, which, if you’ve never tried it, is simply awful. It was nothing like radio, when I’d crack the mike, open my mouth, and then close the mike with a shrug and a, “Well, that happened. What’s next?”
So we kinda let the podcast fade, but Amanda and I made the commitment to post at least one thing to the site every day. But here’s the problem with that kind of commitment: when you eventually get a new and better job, and your partner finally gets that promotion, and eventually a little kitten requiring care and play moves into your house, well, that once-a-day commitment becomes damn hard.
And if you are one of the few readers who has become a regular, you’ve see how that extra difficulty has affected the site. It’s been quite a while since we posted more than one article in a day, and it’s been damn near two months since we’ve posted a comic book review. And that’s because there’s just no time anymore; Amanda works late more often that not, and I have to take care of our mascot Parker The Kitten, and when it’s all said and done well… let’s just say that comic book reviews generally take me two to three hours to write. And those are hours I just don’t have anymore.
But in the meantime, what we have learned is that we don’t need to record podcasts the way we did at the start. Not only could we record them live to tape (the way we have since we reintroduced the podcast a couple of months ago), thus simulating live radio and comedy and eliminating the wretched need to keep listening to the show until we’re convinced it sucks, but we learned that we can do other nifty stuff that we’ll be setting up and unveiling in the coming months.
And more importantly: we now have a lot of fun doing the podcast, whereas we currently need to struggle for one of us to free up an hour here or an hour there to try and write something every day. Which has led is to a decision…
…Crisis On Infinite Midlives can no longer guarantee to post written content every day. We will be, effective immediately, focusing on producing and improving our podcast.
We are not giving up on written content; after all, SDCC 2014 is coming, and we will likely post some write-ups and post some photos… but we will also be producing and posting short podcasts from the field, hopefully with some cool audio and special guests to make listening worth your while.
To those readers who’ve been with us for the past few years: thank you. And we hope you’ll check in now and again to see new written content, while still giving our podcast a chance.
You can directly subscribe to our show here, or subscribe to it via iTunes here. As we set up other ways to find the show, we’ll let you know here.
Thanks again for sticking with us for the past few years, and we hope you’ll give our Internet radio show a chance; we post a new episode every Sunday.
And now, for tradition’s sake (and not for the last time…)
…see you later, suckers!
Since we are less than 36 hours away from leaving for San Diego Comic-Con 2014, and therefore are fully engaged in preparing for the trip, we are a little fried today. So this is a shorter than usual episode (not the end of the world, considering we plan to podcast direct from the convention at least a couple of times), but a full one, where Amanda and I discuss:
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