Farewell, Geocities

After years of rumors, Yahoo has finally decided to close Geocities sometime this year.

I can’t say I’ll miss GeoCities itself — but there are still a lot of sites connected to comics fandom hosted there. Some are kept current, some are old but still contain useful information, and some are snapshots of an earlier era of online fandom

It was a time before MySpace and Twitter and Facebook. Before Google and Wikipedia. Before “weblog” was shortened to “blog,” back when discussions took place not on forums but on IRC, newsgroups and mailing lists, and even having an email address meant you were kind of weird. Everyone with a website belonged to 2 or 3 webrings, fan sites handed out awards to each other regularly, and Jonah Weiland’s name always appeared in front of “Comic Book Resources.” It was still worth asking your local store for a copy of Comic Shop News, because it wasn’t just a digest of last month’s Newsarama articles.

At the time I started Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning (on a server provided by my college) in the mid-1990s, a lot of comics fan sites were on Geocities, including several that I helped out with. The first profiles I made of Flash villains were written for the long-gone Scarlet Speedster website, and I remember contributing bios to an Impulse site at one point as well.

Of course fan sites appear and disappear all the time. I watched a lot of fan sites die out during the late 1990s as people graduated from schools, started jobs, went into the military or just stopped posting. As various Flash sites fell by the wayside, I expanded the scope on my own site to fill the gaps they left. (Evidently I had too much time on my hands.) After a while it was kind of a last-site-standing situation, until Dixon relaunched Crimson Lightning (originally a review site) as a blog a few years ago. It’s nice to see a resurgence of Flash fan sites lately.

As for the sites still on Geocities today: some, especially the ones that are still active, will no doubt move over the next few months. Others will simply vanish, taking with them a piece of fandom history.

Speed Reading: Rebirth and Revamps

Quick Reviews: Ignition City #2, Detective Comics #853, Dynamo 5 #21

Dynamo 5 #21

Dynamo 5 #21 Jay Faerber, Mahmud A. Asrar, Yildiray Cinar, Ron Riley.

A fun in-between issue. It’s amazing how much actually happens, now that I think about it. The team takes on a group of thugs hopped up on super-steroids, Scrap goes on a date with a guy she met online, Visionary goes on a date with the younger Firebird (and of course, both of them being super-heroes…), Maddie investigates a series of disappearances, Myriad reveals a secret, and a new villain makes his appearance.

I particularly liked the banter between Bridget and her date about the importance of sentence structure and grammar in a prospective date.

On a related note, I’d like to recommend the 2004 one-shot Firebirds by Jay Faerber and Andres Ponce (there’s a preview on Faerber’s website). It tells the story of how a teenager discovers that her mother is actually a super-hero, and the mother discovers that her daughter has inherited her powers. It’s one of the few one-shots that I finished and thought, “Wow, I really wish that was the start of an ongoing series.” It’s nice that the characters have shown up in Noble Causes and Dynamo 5.

Detective Comics #853

Detective Comics #853 Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert
“Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” Part 2 of 2

On first read I didn’t like this as much as I did the first half of the story — at least not as a story — though I did like the themes it presented. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve found myself comparing it to Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” which this is obviously meant to evoke. It approaches the end of an iconic superhero from a completely different direction, though: While Moore told in detail the final adventure of a specific version of Superman, Gaiman instead tells in general terms the way every version of Batman would end: he goes down fighting, because that’s what Batman does. In some ways it reminded me a bit of the Planetary/Batman crossover, only taken more seriously.

I’ll have to dig out Part 1 and re-read the whole story at once.

Incidentally: Wholly appropriate for a Coraline ad to appear on the back cover.

Ignition City #2

Ignition City #2 Warren Ellis and Gianluca Pagliarani

Warren Ellis is really hit-or-miss for me. I absolutely loved Planetary, and usually enjoy his work when he’s doing out-there science fiction (Orbiter, Ocean, etc.) So the idea of writing about the breakdown of the retro-future, taking all the pulp space heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and showing what happens when they’re robbed of their reason for being, sounded fascinating. The meta-element of revisiting a (mostly) dead genre also reminded me of his Apparat book on aviation heroes, Quit City.

But the first issue seemed like little more than scatalogical humor and swearing.

I picked up the second issue. Partly because I had an idea what to expect, and partly because the story has actually gotten going, I enjoyed this one a lot more. It also made me rethink the first issue and realize that it was primarily scene-setting: set up the glory days, then show just how far these people have fallen. They’ve gone from winning interplanetary wars to drinking themselves to death and bragging about the contents of chamberpots.

Interesting to note: The other two books both gave the and artist(s) equal billing. This one is clearly all about Warren Ellis, whose name appears above the title in about twice the size type as Gianluca Pagliarani.

Why Blackest Night #0 is a Free Comic Book

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I took a quick look at a site where people were discussing scans of a few pages of Blackest Night #0, one of DC’s offerings for Free Comic Book Day. While there I noticed a discussion as to why this continuity-heavy lead-in to the big 2009 event was not suitable for a new reader who has just wandered into a comic store for the first time (or the first time in several years) to check out the free stuff (that being the primary purpose of FCBD).

Here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s intended for that audience.

I think DC has realized that Free Comic Book Day brings in a lot of regular comics readers looking for something free, like a sale, and they’re going after that audience. This isn’t aimed at people who have never read a comic book. It’s aimed at people who are at least somewhat familiar with DC Comics but maybe haven’t been reading Green Lantern and need a primer for the multiple Corps and the Blackest Night prophecy so that they can jump into the event. It’s aimed at people who read some DC Comics, but weren’t planning on picking up the next big event, but hey, since this one’s free, why not take a look?

And given that it sounds like DC’s entire line is going to be involved in this event over the next 8 months or so, it still works as an introduction to their output.

Flash: Rebirth to be Extended?

Speed Reading: Central City, Lightning Pants, Podcast

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With Barry Allen returning, it’s clear that Central City is going to get a lot more attention. The Absorbascon has calculated the size of Central City based on depictions in Flash comics, determining that it covers 62 times the area of Manhattan and contains 100 million people. Actually, the Absorbascon has a running feature on the vastness that is Central City.

Comic Coverage looks at the earliest costume tweaks for the Flash: the disappearing lightning bolts on Jay Garrick’s legs.

The Views from the Longbox podcast is starting a series of additional episodes focused on Flash: Rebirth, Views from the Speed Force.

4thletter has an interesting question: What’s your deal-breaker? What would cause you to drop a book, or a writer, or a publisher, or even comics altogether?