On January 1, 2020, full of large plans, crackling energy, and a desire to create something good and useful for the community that we love, we launched SOLRAD into the world. Now, nearly 1,400 posts later, we begin our 4th year as the online literary magazine for comics, continuing to aspire to these goals.
As we wrote in our very first post, “Our motto, ‘Luceo, non uro,’ is translated from the Latin as ‘I shine, not burn.’ We will shine light on comics and its greater network; our critics will honestly engage with art and seek to understand and explain it.”
No hot takes. No conflicts of interest or being beholden to anything outside our own sense of what is right. SOLRAD continues to be home to thoughtful criticism from diverse voices exploring the medium of comics. We continue to stand by our core values of comics, criticism, collaboration, and community.
Since 2020, the book publishing arm of Fieldmouse Press has built momentum and, I think I can say this, has landed in a place none of us ever dreamed of back when we started. As that publishing side of Fieldmouse Press has expanded, SOLRAD has contracted a bit. We are publishing fewer comics and criticism per week on the site now than in the first two years. But a lack of quantity in no way means any less quality. As publisher of SOLRAD, I am as proud of the work we publish on SOLRAD as I was on day one..
We continue to seek out the work of established comics critics while always keeping an eye out for new voices in the field. We continue to pay our writers at a rate we can afford that, we hope, honors the work we publish – nobody is getting rich in small press comics. This year we hope to raise that honorarium a bit, and we’ll be sure to let everyone know when we do.
Who knows what 2023 will bring – I mean who could have anticipated what happened shortly after we began publishing in 2020 – but, again, I can assure you that all of us working behind the scenes at SOLRAD and Fieldmouse Press do what we do because, frankly, we love comics and its community and want to see both not only grow, but thrive.
As always, if you have any feedback or thoughts or just want to shoot the shit, my mailbox is open: elkin@fieldmouse.press.
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