Ten years of Comicbookresources.com
Ten years ago this week, a Web site that would change my life (by introducing me to my future wife, among other things), went online. Or at least, it took on a non-links page form, which in turn would end up changing my life.
The site was ComicBookResources.com. When Webmaster Jonah Weiland decided to put up a fan site for the new DC Comics miniseries “Kingdom Come,” he ended up forming a central clearinghouse for fan info on the series (which is loaded with references and appearances by obscure 50+ year old characters) in an age when large fansites for any and all things geeky weren’t the #2 feature of the Internet (behind porn, of course).
I found the site when I went online after reading the second issue of the series, which I bought at the comic shop in the shopping center next to the Potomac News. I couldn’t figure out who the heck some of these characters were, so I went back to my desk, fired up my computer and used the then cutting-edge search engine, Altavista (which the years have not been kind to) to look up “kingdom come dc comics appearances” and found Jonah’s Kingdom Come Message Board. I found the answer to my questions about who was who in this series, and more than a decade before MySpace, I found an online community before I knew there was such a thing. Among those community members was Jenn, then a college student at Cal State Northridge.
When I moved out to California to be with her, I found getting to work for a new newspaper a little problematic (that’s what you get with moving to the #2 media market in the country, wise guy; all the jobs are locked down and there’s hundreds of people in line ahead of you for openings) and Jonah offered me the chance to scratch my journalism itch doing comic journalism. While I’ve never been Employee of the Month anywhere, I was Employee #1 at CBR. At the time (and still to a large extent today), comics journalism consisted of really painful Q&As.
(Free Journalism 101 tip: Unless you’re writing for a Playboy Interview, Q&A makes you look like a nimrod, more often than not, since no one wants to see your “humorous” back and forth with a complete stranger or the poorly phrased questions that elicit unclear and not worth reprinting answers. You bury that stuff with a shovel like the rest of us do, if you’re smart, and then bury the shovel. If you’re really, really good, you can do a Q&A. But honestly, few people are that good, in my not-so-humble burying-the-bad-questions-with-a-shovel opinion.)
I convinced Jonah to take a flyer on true article-format journalism, he handed over his contact list, and we were off and running, putting together years of journalism I’m pretty proud of. (Alas, more than a little of it has been lost to server crashes and such in those early years.) And with content came more readers and more advertisers and today, Jonah is one of two friends of mine who lives off his Web site. (The other is Greg of Greg’s Movies at Yahoo! Movies, formerly UpcomingMovies.com. I actually encouraged both of them to quit their “real jobs” in the same week, which Jenn had some strong opinions about, once she found out I was pushing them to become penniless and unemployed.)
Today, Jonah has a multimedia empire, as well as hosting pretty much everyone a geek could love. In Internet years, he’s been online practically as long as Al Gore.
I’m hardly alone in that CBR changed my life. I suspect big time comics writer Gail Simone (who once said I was among the least funny people she knew, and she’s a paid funny person) and many others can say the same.
My hat’s off to you, Jonah. If I wore a hat with any regularity, that is.
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Wow, dude. Just wow. Thank you.
Comment by Jonah Weiland — May 11, 2006 @ 0:10