If you’re a digital hoarder like The Beat you may wake up one day and realize you have some bookmark files that go back 10 years or more. And then you may poke around and you may find something like. Bradley’s Almanac – comic book links which was last updated more than nine years ago.
As carebones as it looks now, it must have been a pretty good list of links for comics related stuff on the internet back in the day. A couple of things jump out—how many of the sites covering comics were in some way inspired by Warren Ellis and his forum—Ninth Art, Opi8, Artbomb. And how many people were doing things way back nine years ago—Neil Gaiman, Peter David. But a lot has changed. LIke the five webcomics listed. And stuff like:
O’Malley, Bryan Hopeless Savages artist
A simpler world. About 50% of the publishers listed are still around, not counting ones that went on hiatus like Valiant and Alternative.
Poking around I did find some groovy Paul Hornschemeier webcomics though, above.
I do the same thing with old preview issues of Amazing Heroes.
It’s like finding an old box in the back of the attic.
The huge gaping hole in that list is Erik Larsen, who started rocking an online messageboard way back in, like, 1998 or something. I know because my entire life was posting on that messageboard back then. Amazing how many guys who are comics pros now that posted on the various incarnations of that board way back when…Robert Kirkman, Joe Keatinge, ECC showrunner Jim Demonakos, Marvel editor Jordan White, Bomb Queen/Pocket God/No Place Like Home colorist Paul Little, “The Hollow Planet” artist Kyle Morton, colorist/”Capes” artist Mark Englert…and I’m sure there’s more. Man, that was a great messageboard.
So what interesting message boards are left now? Comics Journal ended theirs in 2011. Comics Buyer’s Guide ended theirs. The Comicon.com message board is pretty bland compared to what it was like years ago. Where’s the place worth checking out every day today?
Good question! Are there any? I gave up the only ones* I regularly visited years ago when I got sick with getting in semantic arguments with strangers. These days, I prefer using (and reading) the comments sections on blogs like this one and Robot 6, though that’s not *quite* the same thing as a messageboard as you can’t originate your own threads.
* I should note I do still use the messageboard at Bleeding Cool, but I only ever visit the threads linked to news stories, so they may as well be blog comment threads.
Forums, let’s see…The CBR forums seem to still be busy when I look, and Comic Bloc (formerly the Geoff Johns forums which are actually on this list) is still around. IIRC the Outhousers started up when Newsarama redid their forums. I’m not sure how active any of these are, though. I really pulled back from forum posting a couple of years ago when it became clear that it was just making me angry instead of being fun.
These days I mainly follow blogs, Twitter, and Reddit’s /r/comicbooks and /r/dccomics subreddits.
Twitter’s an interesting development because it’s so free-wheeling. Like the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. That, and the immediacy of seeing new posts as they arrive, makes it more vibrant than any forum I’ve ever followed, but it also makes it nigh-impossible to follow a particular topic or catch up on anything older than a few hours. It’s really a different kind of beast entirely than forums or Facebook/blog comment threads.
This totally made my day yesterday. Thanks, Heidi!
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