As much as I love talking about music, and writing about music here on the Roseandblog, anyone who knows me can attest that I also love talking about comics. When I started the Roseandblog back in October 2014, it was for music reviews and music articles only—something that’s remained a part of the blog all throughout its three-and-a-half year existence. It wasn’t until just last month, when Marvel released the Black Panther film, that I was reminded of how music and comics can greatly overlap.
Sure, there’s Ed Piskor’s Hip-Hop Family Tree comic series (shown below), which should have made the connection for me back before the blog was even an idea, or even when I was using it as reference material for my own hip-hop chronicling. And sure, me remembering how cool it is when comics and music come together isn’t really the most important thing about Black Panther, but to a nerd like me, it was.
Kendrick Lamar rapping “All hail King Killmonger” might be the coolest cross-promotion ever conceived, and Ludwig Gorannson (Childish Gambino’s producer), recording African musicians for the film score like he was trying to make Paul Simon seem cool again, was the cherry on top of a dream project entitled Black Panther: The Album.
To some it might be a completely new world, and to others it might already be very familiar, but I hope to write about comics in a similar vein and voice that I do with music, and just about anything else. I plan on writing a weekly post highlighting my favorite new comics (as they come out every Wednesday), and I hope you’ll join me in discovering what makes comics so amazing.
If it’s not your thing, every other post on the blog will still be about music, but if you feel like reading along with me and talking about comics, that could be something really great too. The Roseandblog isn’t a team of people, and it doesn’t have any kind of strict branding that I can’t mold at will. It’s just me, “Your Friendly Neighborhood Music Critic,” and what better way to honor a slogan about being a music critic that also references Spider-Man than to truly embrace both.