Thank you for taking time to visit my site. I would like to start and tell you a little bit about myself and this site.
Hi my name is Denny Riccelli and I’ve been a comic fan since
about 12 years old. I always tell people I owe my life to comics. It’s true.
See, when I was 12 years old I could not read or at least I had the reading
ability of a 6 years old. Then one day instead of putting my quarters into the
Pac-man machine at the local convenient store, I found a spinner rack full of
comics and bought one. GI Joe #45 was my first comic, followed the next day by
my purchase of Web of Spider-man #12. Notice I said ‘the next day’, I was
bitten by the comic bug and it was bad. Bad because I could not get enough of
them and bad because I could not read them. So over the summer with the aid of
a dictionary and occasionally my mom, I was able to figure this reading thing
out and by the age of 13, I was reading
at an 8 years old level. Comics had help me increase my reading ability
2 years in a matter of months. By the time I was 14, I had the reading ability
of an 18 year old. In a little over one year comics had caught me up and taught
me how to read. Without comics I would not have the life I have today.
Why did I share this with you, well because I wanted you to
know how invested I am in comics personally. They have been part of my life
since I was 12 years old (I’m currently 40) and then will be here until the day
I die. I started out as most fans do reading what are known as mainstream
comics, Marvel and DC usually. Heck I have not missed a new release Wednesday
since I was 15 years old and do not plan on missing one any time soon. However
while I enjoy the mainstream books I quickly found my way to the alternative
options. First it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then I found Cerebus and
before I knew it I was reading books by Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, Xaime and
Gilbert Hernandez, etc.
my first two comic purchases
Fast forward a little to around 18 or 19 years old, I found
a copy of Factsheet 5 at a local record
store and discovered that there was a thing called mini-comics. An awesome
little photocopied version of a comic book. Up until this point I had been
drawing comics for myself. I even did a
strip for the Peter Piper Pizza that I work at, but I never dreamed I could
make my own books. A couple more years
past and I started to make my own mini-comic imitating the ones that I was
buying through Factsheet 5.
This brings us rather quickly up to today. Maybe someday
someone will do a full blown interview with me and I can talk at length about
the other major point in my comic life that I have skipped over, but for now I
was rambling too much. So as time has passed, I had found more and more of
these little comic treasures in the form of mini-comics and other
self-published works, but not a website that really specialized in information
about them. Most of them time I would hear about the books through an interview
or social media and then purchase them. Sometimes I’m a too late and the book
has sold out by the time I have heard of it. I thought it would be great to
have a website that reported on mini-comic and independent comic news similar
to the way sites report on mainstream comics. So I created COMICS NEVER STOP with
that goal in mind. News and Reviews about mini and self-published comics. I
plan to start of slowly with only me doing reviews and as I find people who I
think would be a good fit, add them to the site. I hope you will join me for
the ride.
-Denny Riccelli creates comics under the pen name ‘dennmann’
he currently publishes the webcomic
Cousin Harold and some mini-comics now and then, including Jenny Spookawski
Ghost Girl. He lives in Peoria, Arizona with his wife and 2 kids.