You ever totally forget what you were doing?

You know what I mean. Stick your keys in the fridge, grab your wallet and the carton of milk and get into your car totally screwed? Set the alarm clock to record Letterman and program your VCR to wake you up in the morning?

Shit like that.

Happens to the best of us.

As we've demonstrated. "We," in this case, being the collective SAVANT.

When we started up, we had a clear mission, and three loud voices reminding us where we were supposed to be. I was invited to write for Savant before the launch, but a quick check of the archives shows there's nothing from me in the first few issues.

Was it because my articles weren't good enough? Nope, although my drafts were spiked like volleyballs for those first few weeks.

It was because I hadn’t yet fully grasped the activist spirit of this new website. And make no mistake: Savant was both activist and new when Dave Potter, Matt Fraction, and Alec Austin created this baby out of whole cloth. There were comic book review sites out there, and comic book news sites, and at least one special-interest/activist site in Sequential Tart. But high-class theory sites like Ninth Art and outreach sites like Artbomb.net were nowhere to be found.

So, based on Warren Ellis' reminiscences about the inkies of his youth and bucketloads of attitude on the part of Fraction, Austin, and Potter, Savant was created. And it wasn't created just to make noise.

This was signal all the way, signal in its purest form. There was a point to Savant. It wasn't just meant to change the way YOU, the reader, thought. It was meant to help you change the way everyone you knew and everyone you saw thought. And once you’d changed yourself and the way you thought, you were meant to change the world.

But real life stepped in, as it tends to. Changing the world takes time, and the results aren’t always immediately evident. Editorial shake-ups shattered the original brain trust trio, and it became more of a struggle to assemble content and get it out there than to get YOU to do what WE say. A sense of happiness and pride over what had been achieved gave way to contentment and complacency.

That ends now.

Here's the deal: your job doesn't end with reading this. Reading this is just the very first step.

The second step is actually DOING THINGS. That’s right. We’ve got work to do now, and if you're not doing the work, you're just part of the problem.

Since you're here, you're likely someone who wants to do more. If all you read is super-hero comics, you're thinking about trying something different, be it mature readers’ titles, the indies, or out-there webcomics. You know that there’s all sorts of great stuff out there, and you’re ready to find out about it.

If you're already one of these more "enlightened" readers, then you're either trying to figure out how to get your friends to view comics the way you do, or you’re planning to create your own comics.

If you're planning to create, you have no intention of being satisfied writing the latest issue of the flavor of the week. And if you're trying to get your friends involved . . . well, that means you have friends who don’t read comics, which is a guarantee that you’re not just the stereotypical comic book geek.

No matter which of the above descriptions suits you, you're the person Savant is written for.

And your job is simple. Start DOING SOMETHING - whether that be activism, spreading the word, or creating comics -- or get the fuck out of the way for the rest of us.

Best case scenario would have you doing all three, and becoming a missionary activist comic book creator. But that may be a bit outsized for a first step. So let’s break it down into easy, bite-size pieces.

Our first choice would be to have you taking action. This is easier than it sounds, because SAVANT-style activism begins with understanding how your actions as a comics reader can help change the industry. Find our front page link to the Activist’s Cookbook. This is a PDF archive of some of our best pieces on activism and changing the industry. There are plenty of things to do in there even beyond just changing yourself. Ways to get more people reading comics, ways to make comic book shops better, ways to DO SOMETHING.

Download that by clicking on the link. If nothing comes up, you need Acrobat Reader 5.0 or better. That's free, and we link you straight to the download page. That’s how fucking easy this is. Download the Cookbook, print it out, and you’ve got a whole lot of activism to get you started.

Literal activism. As in, actual actions that YOU can take to make things better.

Spreading the word is pretty easy, too. Somewhere on the front page, you'll find a link to the PDF of the current issue of Savant. Find that link. Click it. Or just click the link in this paragraph. Again, you may need Acrobat Reader 5.0 for this. It’s still free, and we still link to it from our site.

Once everything’s in order, the whole issue will open, formatted and everything. Print it out, take it to your neighborhood copy shop and copy it. Make a bunch of copies.

Take the copies to your local comic book shop, and find out where you can leave the free shit. If they don't have a designated "Leave Free Shit Here" spot, leave it by the register. If they won't let you do that, DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR BUSINESS. The customer is always right, and in this case, the customer wants to Spread the Goddamned Word.

If you want bonus points, don’t just leave it at your comic shop. Go to your local Starbucks, or coffee house, or university student center or wherever and leave copies for those fine non-comics reading people too. Changing the world doesn’t just involve the patrons of your local comic shop. We’re thinking bigger here, and you should too.

You can do this every time we release a new issue -- the date of the next update should be right on the front page.

Easy, right?

If you want to make comics . . . well, then it's a bit tougher, and deserving of a longer piece. SEVERAL longer pieces, in fact. Good thing we’ve already got some, then. Check out Larry Young’s excellent TRUE FACTS here on the site, or go buy his new collection of the columns, all updated and expanded.

If you don’t have time for that right now, do it later. But until then, here’s one very, very brief approach. Because everyone has to start somewhere, the web is a great place to establish yourself. Find a writer or artist -- whichever you need -- on Digital Webbing. Then submit your webcomic to NextComics or Opi8 or any of a number of other quality sites for publication, and you're on your way to being a published creator.

There's another option, I have to admit, before we get to Those Who Cannot Be Bothered. It’s sort of a bit of this and a bit of that: write for us. Think we're doing something wrong? Think we're doing everything right but saying it poorly? Fine. Fix it your goddamned self. We don’t claim to have the monopoly on good ideas or good writing. And we love hearing what you have to say. So write something up and send it to savantmag@aol.com. We may not use it, but if not, you'll definitely hear why.

On the other hand, if you're just someone who wants to get the fuck out of the way, then click here to be taken to Yahoo's listing of comic book websites. Something else there should suit your tastes nicely.

It might seem like we’re asking you to do a lot, especially given that we stumbled ourselves not long ago. But Savant is and has always been about Doing Things, and Doing Them Now. We hit the ground running almost two years ago, and there’s no reason to do anything differently now that we're getting back up to speed.

You're clever, smart, fast, a comic book reader On The Verge. DO SOMETHING or get the fuck out of the way.

We've remembered what we're here for. Now it's time for you to do the same.

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