2022 And All That – A Year In Reprobate

Rounding up 2022 with a look back at what we’ve achieved and ahead to what is to come.

And so, as we reach the end of 2022 – something that looked a tad doubtful from time to time during the year – it’s time to look back on what we – by which I mean The Reprobate – have achieved in the last twelve months.

This year has been a quieter one than most – 281 posts (including this one), which astute mathematicians amongst you will see is less than one a day. There are reasons aplenty for this and we won’t bore you with them. Nevertheless, the aim for next year is to have a significant increase in output. We will probably be doing that with a new style and new identity – in fact, had we not suddenly found our end of year to be a bit chaotic, that might have launched on New Year’s Day. As it is, February now seems more likely. Exciting, eh?

Despite a slowdown in content, this year has felt like the point where the site finally became what I had always wanted, even if I didn’t quite know it. I feel like we have a distinct identity and style now and the next year will see this consolidated and expanded. Our dabblings in video and podcasting have not quite hit the mark yet because hey, they are toes in the water – but we have plans for 2023 that should work in sympathy with what we are doing on the site while expanding it in ways that mere text can’t.

We continue to encourage outside contributors. Noah Brown’s Lil’ Reprobate cartoons feel like a step forward into having original visual material – expect more of that in terms of cartoons, comic strips and photography. We never did get the Reprobate Page 3 pin-up pages up and running but you never know what our new incarnation might manage.  Potential writers and other contributors should check our guidelines and give us a shout. While our content is eclectic, we are always up for even more oddball, eccentric or esoteric material.

Similarly, we encourage readers who appreciate our efforts to support us through our fundraisers at Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon. We’ll be the first to admit that we have never quite got the latter right – but we now feel that we have a solid system in place that allows mini-payments as thanks for what we do or a bigger monthly contribution that will see you sent random stuff every month. There are options between the two sites for one-off or recurring payments and everything helps keep us going. As you will be aware, we have very little advertising – to appease the demands of advertisers would mean stripping the site of much of the content that makes us what we are, and we have no intention of going down that route.

So what posts have people been reading the most this year? Assuming that there won’t be a sudden surge of interest in a previously unpopular post this evening, we can reveal that the top ten new posts of 2022 have been:

Traingirl: The Awful Death of Mary Wojtyla
The Naked Charity Calendars of 2023
The Whacky World of Whipstock Grange
Wanted! Ridiculously Obscure Films
The Lost World of Sexy Video Game Advertising
The Gallery of Banned Advertising
Mega Seedy – Outrageous Sega Ads from the Pages of Viz
The Naked Truth About Nude Beaches
Space Farce – Todd Rundgren’s Indulgently Bland All-Star Album
Riding Along On My Pushbike, Honey – Pin-Ups on Pedals

Which is a mixed bag that tells us very little. Our Top Ten heritage articles are:

Naked Rock Stars
The Mayfair Magazine Cover Gallery
The Naked Charity Calendars of 2021
Liverpool Library Press – the World’s Most Outrageous Erotic Fiction Publishers
British TV Advertising’s Brief Flirtation with the Female Nipple
The Sleazy World of the True Detective Magazine
The Forgotten World of the British Softcore Video
A Parade of Sixties Glamour
The Naked Charity Calendars of 2022
Hotter Than Hell: the X-Rated Kiss Photo Shoots

That list, at least, makes it clear that sex continues to sell. Many of these are the same perennials that appeared in last year‘s heritage top ten.

As we look forward to the brave new world of 2023 and much up-shaking and new projecting at Reprobate Press, we wish all our regular – and casual – readers a Happy New Year. Let’s all hope that 2023 is a lot more incident-free and boring than the lest few have been – I think we’ve had quite enough excitement and drama already this decade, don’t you?

DAVID FLINT

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