Well I never thought I'd be writing another one of these again, and I'll bet there are a fair number of you who didn't expect to read another one. But here we are. No it wasn't a cruel joke (again) with us faking going out of business. That was just a joke but this time it was the real deal. However the circumstances came together which made continuation of this magazine possible, so let me explain.

First of all, some people from the ad agency where I work needed a publication to run some tequila ads so they could enter them in an awards show. I'd mentioned this as a possibility to them a few months back, and when they finally approached me about running the ads, my response was, "Well that would've been nice a few months ago but since the economy tanked we just pulled the plug on Concussion." However ad rates for color ads in real magazines are above the more or less bottom basement prices we charge our mostly skateboard advertisers in Concussion, and they wanted to run four color spreads, so it was starting to sound like it would be worth my while to at least publish one more "Photo Issue" and dig myself out of some of the debt we were in. So the ball got rolling on getting another issue going, and I was somewhat happy to learn that not all of our existing advertisers had shifted their ad buy away from Concussion, although you may have noticed we no longer have the Volcom ad in the opening spread, which is sad.

Anyway, at the same time all this bullshit with my work is going on, Brendan Klein and Brooks Fritz, two longtime contributing photographers, approached me saying they want to keep Concussion going and don't want to let it die. If there were any people I'd want to keep the mag going, it would honestly be these dudes. They both shoot killer photos and neither of them (that I can tell at least) have that personality disorder that effects most skateboard photographers. Some of you know what I'm talking about, I'm sure. Brendan had been approached by Lance Dawes a while back to be the photo editor of SLAP, which he turned down so he could go take a scholarship to attend art school. Little did he know what a lucky-ass move that was, considering the situation SLAP is in these days. And Brooks has taken some of my all time favorite photos in Concussion. Dorfus lien tailblock on the cover? He shot it. Billy Green both feet over the coping on a frontside grind gone awry, also a cover shot? He shot that one too. Those are just two of the shots that come to mind but his shit is sick as fuck.

So these two dudes want to keep the dream alive and I'm all, "Ok whatever, but I don't think you guys really know what you're in for. It's a lot of work and most of the shit sucks and a lot of the technical aspects of making a magazine are hard to explain or teach." But they wanted to make it happen, so they drove up here and we met up and convinced me that they can do it. I honestly think they still don't know what they're getting themselves into, but if I were a betting man (which I am) I would say they at some point in the next year one or both of these dudes will regret their decision to take over the helm. Editing and publishing a magazine is the kind of thing that sounds real cool when you're sitting at a bar telling your buddys or trying to impress some hot chick, but in actuality it's a lot of No Fun and Missed Sessions While Sitting at the Computer. Anyway, don't say I didn't warn you guys.

So trying to keep this story on track, as things tend to happen at my work, the promises of big bucks for the ads flaked out at the last minute but I had gotten the ball rolling on keeping Concussion going again, and couldn't look like an asshole (again) by saying, "Oh nevermind." So with 1/5 of the promised ad revenue from the color ads (which explains the small amount of color in this issueÑmost likely a one time dealÑdon't get your hopes up, or accuse us of selling out, you pick) we pressed on. The tequila ads were actually pretty okay as far as mainstream ads in a skateboard magazine, but as things tend to go in corporate land, when the lawyers at Hornitos found out that these ads were running in a skateboard mag, they pulled the plug. Totally lame. But at this point my work had already bought the ad space and couldn't back out even though I'm sure they wanted to, so what you're seeing in place of four pretty decent and possibly award-winning Hornitos ads is an ad for the Red Cross and three ads for a TV network called G4, which I've never heard of. So obviously these ads don't really fit at all, and we would all much rather see alcohol ads gracing the pages of ConcussionÑwhich is something I've been striving to make happen for yearsÑbut no dice. I was tempted to run the tequila ads anyway but it probably maybe might have gotten me fired and I can't really afford that right now.

So here we are. Since Brendan and Brooks are new to most anything that doesn't involve taking a photo or adjusting levels in Photoshop, I'm helping them out during this transition period. At some point soon (hopefully after they learn InDesign) we're going to be taking the training wheels off and they can do it on their own without falling down too many times. I'm sure design-wise it will be a little bit of one step forward, two steps back. But if these guys are going to do it themselves, they need to make some of the same mistakes me and Jonathan made, like the overly stoney photoshopped layouts and using all the wrong fonts at least once. Just kidding guys. Well, sort of.

But seriously, I am pretty stoked that Brendan and Brooks want to keep the dream alive. There's nothing like seeing something you started keep on going after you are done with it, and I for one would not have been into making Concussion a website only. At all. It would've died instead. Not to bag on SLAP, but that shit sounds good on paper but in reality it's kind of a bag. And not to bag on High Speed because 99% of the people that work there are good guys, but I am no Kevin Thatcher and Brendan and Brooks are no Jake Phelps. Thank God.