Jinxworld Forums

On Friday, the long running—22 years!—Brian Bendis message board shut down with the above message, and al of its archives went with it.

The Bendis Board was especially busy in the golden age of the message board (1998-2004) and hosted forums for many comics pros, including Gail Simone, David Mack, Kelly Sue DeConnick. I guess some of that will be available on the Way Back Machine, but with the CBR boards being scrubbed, the Bendis Board going away, and rumors of several other foundational message boards being shut down, a lot of comics history is vanished in a way that print just doesn’t offer. As I’m always reminding people, THE INTERNET IS NOT FOREVER.

Former forum member Albert Ching has a good look back including the reminder that it was an incubator for a whole generation of comics pros who posted and became friendly there, including Nick Spencer, Charles Soule, Joe Eisma, Joshua Hale Fialkov and Kody Chamberlain. A refugee message board has been set up here, according to comments.

I was active on the boards for a little while before time ran out, but there were some good people there…and some jerks, as always, but mostly good times.

 

powers_copley_heyward

Anyway, the Powers TV, er, filmed entertainment show, is in the works with Sharlto Copley as Christian Walker and Susan Heyward as Deena Pilgrim. I know Copley won;t be using that super South African accent he had in Elysium, but I can dream on. “My WAFF.”

12 COMMENTS

  1. 1992 is an eternity in Internet time. Where’d the Bendis boards start? Compuserve? A dial-up BBS?

    (I was a Prodigy guy. And 9 years old.)

  2. @Jon: Yeah, 1998 sounds a lot more plausible. But it seems like a pretty unlikely typo, given how far apart the “2” and the “8” keys are. Could have just been a brain fart?

  3. @Thad, it is not incorrect. Bendis had a post a couple years ago celebrating the board being around for 20 years. I was only there for the last 7, but it was definitely not a brain fart from him.

  4. A quick search of groups.google.com shows a usenet post wherein Bendis announced that the Jinxworld forum was open on 5/11/99.

    I’m unsure where the 1992 date comes from, unless he had something on Compuserve or AOL before Jinxworld (which evolved into the Bendis Board) opened and he’s counting from there.

  5. There certainly wasn’t a Bendis-run web site in 1992; the WWW itself didn’t exist until 1991, and I set up one of the early comics-related web sites in 1995 (<a href="http://rzero.com/books/"doing reviews). I do remember Bendis being on Usenet (rec.arts.comics.*) back in those days, and maybe he had a forum section on CompuServe or some BBS, so he might be using that as the “founding” date. But forums of any kind on (let alone creator/fan discussion) were hard to find on the Web in 1992.

  6. Forums come and forums go. But the communities that form around them can live on. Warren Ellis does a slash-and-burn with his online thingies from time to time, and when he did that with The Engine several years ago, a bunch of the creator folks there picked up and set up a new forum, eventually ending up at SequentialWorkshop.com which is going to this day.

  7. Of course there was a 1992 Bendis board. Where else could somebody go to talk about all of the work he had done up until that point, like the two issues of “Quiver”, or that “Parts of a Hole” one-off? (And that’s it.)

    Sure, the board was a bit lean at first, like in 1992, when he didn’t actually publish anything, at all. But it was there!

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