As of this week, Mars Will Send No More has been on WordPress for eleven years, and that must mean my forty-ninth birthday is only weeks away. I never expected either of us to last this long or have so much to say, but I guess we just got caught up in things.

A few months ago, I was talking to a family member about writing my most recent short story and how I estimated it would be around 16,000 words long. Her response was, “I don’t think I have 16,000 words to say about anything!”

Clearly, I was not talking to a comic-book geek. How many of us comics fans have blogs (or now YouTube channels) and pour out thousands upon thousands of words every year? Some of us don’t even care if we get paid or if anyone reads. We love this particular storytelling medium and love talking or writing about it.

Over the past few years, besides sharing my writing and personal memoirs with you from time to time, this site’s main focus has been on Indie Comics and the Big Box of Comics. The former series features independent and creator-owned work, and the latter is a tribute to the treasures I occasionally afford thanks to readers who click though the affiliate links in my “Collectors’ Guides” to buy books.

As a result, my personal Indie Box has become several boxes, and the Big Box of Comics overflowed to the point that I needed to buy another bookshelf last year. My only regret is that I have not yet pounded out several thousands of words about some truly stellar series that are dear to my heart. But that’s something to pencil in for 2022.

Thank you for dropping by to read, comment, send me your work, share your discoveries, exchange vintage scans, and occasionally mail weird and wonderful things. You’ve made this a hell of a lot of fun for me.

February 2022 Update: While digging through the digital archives for dinosaur art to share, I realized what a ramshackle mess many of my older posts had become. They were originally formatted using an old WordPress system before “blocks” became the go-to method, and I’d assembled them with an older and now abandoned layout in mind. As a noobie blogger, I also had certain goals in mind that influenced how I did things in the early days, and those goals have been met and yet evolved and changed.

So, I upgraded old posts to the newer “blocks” and cleaned out many dead links, trashed some outdated or now irrelevant material, and deleted posts whose images were missing or corrupted. Along the way, I added hundreds of new links to specific posts because, for example, I would find a post from 2012 that discussed a random topic I have now covered more extensively.

It was no small task going through more than 1500 posts, but the archives now look and read better than ever: cleaner, more consistent, more inviting, and less cluttered. I hope they are now more fun to get lost in and explore for a few hours, and better at helping people discover comics and art that have rocked my world. Enjoy!