I couldn't find anything recent about Deppey, though. In fact, his entry in Wikipedia doesn't have anything more recent than 2010 either. Admittedly, I didn't do a ton of exhaustive research here, but I'd guess Deppey went on to get some other job -- we've all got bills to pay, after all -- and it unfortunately doesn't involve talking about comics online.
In that post where I talked about Deppey, I noted that comics 'news' was kind of bifurcating into broad, mass-appeal stuff talking about the latest Marvel movie or Scholastic's latest success with Raina Telgemeier or Dav Pilkey, or going the super-niche route where the site is pretty much entirely driven on the passion of a single individual. Essentially blogs like mine. Well, not unlike mine is probably more accurate. I went on to say that the danger of the latter is that...
...just as a guy like Deppey can lose his job, a guy like [Tom] Spurgeon can grow tired or disinterested. If his returns -- financial or emotional or creative -- drop too low, he can easily stop and walk away. And despite whatever sense of entitlement readers have, there's really no recourse but to search around to find others' voices that are interesting or insightful.Spurgeon did not, as it turns out grow tired or disinterested, but he sadly passed away in 2019 so we no longer have his voice. But in that same post, I also referred to Jen Contino over at The Pulse, Ian Adams of Trade Reading Order, and Heidi MacDonald of The Beat. I also made reference to Wizard, CBG, Amazing Heroes, and Comics Feature. Of course, all of those print materials no longer exist. Contino was let go from The Pulse and had to get a "real job." (I used to follow her on Facebook before I closed my account there; she seemed to be doing well, and maintained an interest in comics, but she wasn't doing any real writing about them.) The Pulse got bought/absorbed by the broadly pop culture Comicon.com and no longer exists. I've no idea about Adams personally, but it doesn't look like Trade Reading Order has been updated since 2013. MacDonald and The Beat basically remain as The Last Woman Standing.
I don't hold it against anyone whose voice about comics is no longer heard. We're living in an aggressively capitalistic culture, and that means you've got to work your ass off, however you can, just to get by. Frequently, that means setting aside what you're actually passionate about so you can earn enough to not be forced into homelessness. For most of the voices you see/hear talking about comics, they're folks who are financially successful enough in non-comics venues that their comics work is effectively subsidized. That's certainly how/why I'm still writing this blog after two decades; I barely make enough writing about comics to go to Starbucks once a month. Rob Salkowitz's comics writing is at least partially subsidized by his teaching at the University of Washington. From Women Write About Comics, Nola Pfau has been working at a senior living facility for several years, and Jenna Ledford has spent most of the last decade working at the University of North Texas. My buddy Jed Keith from FreakSugar teaches high school social studies.
Again, the vast majority of comics "journalists" are writing about comics because they're passionate about the subject and feel emotionally and/or creatively rewarded. But because life in the 21st century is what it is, there's no real social safety net and "writing about comics effectively for free" isn't financially sustainable, that gets dropped when you suddenly find yourself having to take care of a family member or taking up a second job in order to make rent or just plain getting exhausted by the end of the day with the one job you do have. So we see writers and commentators flit in and out of the comics "news" cycle, and we -- as readers -- are left having to continually find new voices and sources of industry information. I believe only two of the comics related sites I visit these days were even around back in 2010 when I wrote that original post (and one was barely a year old); most of the sites where I got my news are gone. Or so radically changed as to be an entirely new site.
Cultural capital is definitely a strong driver of whose voices are heard these days, but financial capital has more than a little influence on that as well!
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