Speed Force

I just found out that Speed Force won the October 2008 Project Fanboy Award! (That explains the traffic I was getting from them last week!)

I remember the first ever website award I got was for the “Site of the Week” award from what was then called Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources. A lot of fan sites would give out awards back in the late 1990s, and then it sort of fell out of fashion. It’s cool that there are sites still doing it — and it’s cool to have actually been honored by one!

Thanks to whoever nominated Speed Force for the award, and thanks to the Project Fanboy staff!

Today’s Lying in the Gutters has a couple of covers from the upcoming Top Cow Velocity series, both by Madame Mirage’s Kenneth Rocafort.

Wizard has a retrospective on Grant Morrison, including his brief run with Mark Millar on The Flash.

In local news, my review of Flash #244 has become the first post on this blog to pass 700 page views.

It’s often fun to look at the weird search terms people sometimes use to reach a site, but for the most part the terms showing up in the log here have been pretty straight-forward. The weirdest is probably “steampunk ambush bug.”

That said, to the reader who searched for “rogues revenge 4 spoilers” — I hope that was a typo, and you meant Rogues’ Revenge #3 (due out this week), because it’s only a 3-issue miniseries.

You can now follow Speed Force on Twitter at SpeedForceOrg! In addition to announcing new blog entries, I’ll be posting updates and the occasional random bits and pieces. The latest few tweets will also appear in the blog sidebar.

Speaking of which, that sidebar is getting kind of crowded. I’m going to have to do something about that eventually.

Some administrivia today.

1. As of Monday, it’s been three months since I launched this blog. I have no idea what the typical lifetime for a comics-related blog is, but I can say I’ve kept this up far more regularly than I expected, with 162 posts in 94 days — an average of 1.7 posts per day! — and readers have made nearly 350 comments!

It’s also taking a lot more time than I expected, which has kept me away from other projects. (In particular, I’d planned a major update for the Alternative Browser Alliance this summer, which has become more urgent with the announcement and first beta of Google’s Chrome web browser.) I may be scaling back a little on Speed Force soon, but I’ll still aim for several posts a week.

2. I finally got around to replacing the banner at the top of the page. I didn’t want to stick with the theme’s default, since “train station” doesn’t really say “speedster,” and I was never really satisfied with the fractal “lightning.” (Besides, the smallest I could get that image without making it look really nasty was a whopping 50 KB.)

Still, I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer or an artist. Give me the graphics and I’ll build the HTML and CSS to turn them into a web page, but original art? It would make XKCD look like George Pérez. So instead of trying to draw something, I looked for photos of actual lightning on Flickr. I adapted “Lightning Crashes” by ~Prescott under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. The banner can be re-used and/or modified under the same terms.

3. After a struggle for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite with Collected Editions, we’ve both been superseded by a number of high-profile blogs that have joined, including Once Upon a Geek, The Absorbascon and 4thLetter. Speed Force has been holding steady around #12 lately.

4. I’ve dropped the Recent Visitors/Viewers boxes from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. They add a lot to the download time, especially on certain browsers *cough* IE *cough* that wait until they’re loaded before displaying the main section of the page.

The news blog Voices from Krypton has invited me to do a weekly Flash column. I’ll be writing a round-up of the week’s events. I’ll also be cross-posting my reviews of the Flash issues, at least for now.

Top Cow’s Velocity comic book by has been pushed back from November to a January launch. Publisher Filip Sablik:

We hit a “speed bump” (ouch!) and rather than stick with the original solicitation schedule and end up with a late book, we opted to push Velocity back to a January launch. The delay in solicitation will ensure that the series will come out in a timely fashion and Joe Casey and ChrisCross have the time to make this series truly butt-kicking.

Speed Force lost the fight for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite when long-established blogs The Absorbascon and 4thLetter! signed up. Now it’s trading off spots 5 and 6 with downthetubes.net.

Asgard Press is publishing a Vintage DC Super-Heroes Calendar for 2009, featuring covers from the 1930s through 1960s. It’s a 16-month calendar, and October 2008 features the cover to Showcase #4, first appearance of the Silver-Age Flash. (The Golden-Age Flash Comics #37 gets a spot too, but it’s a Hawkman cover.)

Speaking of Comic Blog Elite, MTV sent them a request/press release about casting for True Life: I’m a Fanboy: “If you appear to be between the ages of 16 and 28, and want to share the story of your fantasy obsession, email us at fanboy@mtvn.com with all of the details. Be sure to include your name, location, phone number and a photo, if possible.”

When I launched this blog, I did several things in order to promote it. I added it to my forum signatures. I took blogs that I read occasionally and made them regular reads, and started using this URL when commenting. And I submitted the site to some relevant blog directories.

I found Comic Blog Elite through Collected Editions. Speed Force started off fairly low in rank (in part because it started late in the day, so the daily averages were pulled down by that first day with only 1 or 2 hours), but it’s been slowly climbing up the ranks. I figured it would eventually settle around #5 or so.

Amazingly, for the last few days, Speed Force and Collected Editions have been vying for the #3 spot.

Wow!

Here’s a big thank-you to everyone who’s been reading!

I’ll be attending Comic-Con International in San Diego next week. For the last few years I’ve been posting reports during the con at my other blog, K-Squared Ramblings, and I’ll continue that this year in the Comic-Con 2008 category. I will be posting stuff here as well, especially anything Flash-related — like these Flash hall costumes from last year, or the 50 Years of the Flash panel two years ago.

This will be my 19th year at the con, which I’ve attended every summer since 1990. Scary numbers, there.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of my past convention reports and photos, including San Diego from 2003-2007, Wizard World Los Angeles from 2007-2008, and WonderCon 2008.

Wow… it’s hard to believe it’s been a month since I launched this blog. I’m starting to get a feel for how I want to structure it — what to include, when, etc. But this is supposed to be a resource for Flash fans, so I thought I’d ask you: what do you want from this site?

Specifically:

1. When should I post the list of each week’s Flash-related comics?  Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday?
2. What about more general comics content?  The site is going to stay focused on the Flash and other speedsters, and I’ve got another blog to post completely unrelated stuff.  But what about posts like this one on spending at San Diego Comic-Con?
3. Should it lean more towards news or commentary? I’m thinking in terms of Warren Ellis’ post on content vs. linkblogs last week, and realizing that this first month has been very link-heavy.
4. What other features would you like to see?

Also, I’ve got a request for you, if you like the site: Please spread the word! For instance:

• Promote the occasional article on your favorite social bookmarking site, like Digg, or StumbleUpon, or Del.icio.us. (I’ll try to help by writing posts that are worth linking to!)
• Review the blog. Speed Force is listed in several directories, but hasn’t picked up any ratings or reviews yet. That includes Comic Blog Elite, Blog Catalog, Blog Explosion (members only), and StumbleUpon (ditto).
• If you really like it, and have your own blog, please add it to your blogroll. (Thanks to site that have already done this, including Comic Book Revolution, ACDC Comics Report, Smoking Boots, Blogging Away in LA, and We gotta to go to the crappy town where I’m the hero!)
• Mention it from time to time on comic boards that you visit, or to friends who like the Flash. (When appropriate, of course.)

Also, please let me know about any cool Flash news or interesting articles you see. I still haven’t set up that contact form, but you can email me at speedforce [at] pobox [dot] com or send me a PM at any of the forums listed on the About Page.

Thanks!

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.6. I probably should have held off a bit, but there were some things I really wanted to be able to use, like the new Gears support, version history on posts, and improved image management.

Call it an impulse.

Anyway, if anything is broken, please let me know in the comments here — or if you can’t comment, please email me at speedforce [at] pobox [dot] com.