It seems more than a little startling that what started out as an idle hobby has now been going for a decade. Progress has been sporadic: after all, comic book reviews take time and other pressures – careers, family and so on – take precedence. This year in particular has been slow in respect of productivity, mostly because the editor (me) in his (my) spare time is an intellectual property lawyer and had two significant trials scheduled throughout the year.
The infrequent newsletter located on this link The Other Side of the World – our infrequent newsletter – World Comic Book Review has provided the odd insight into how the WCBR has been functioning. It is very much reliant upon its contributors. I especially want to thank Neil Raymundo of Manila, who I met on the DC Comics Message Boards – the Lucifer forum – and who has solved innumerable technical issues with the site and scribes away with sufficient buoyancy to counterbalance my condescension. I would also like to thank our other contributors who have come and gone over the past decade:
- Guido Negretti
- Roque Briones
- Joseph B Christy
- Paul Murphy
- Tom Kelly (who I also met on the DC Comics Message Boards back in 2000)
- Greggory Basore
- Maxwell Yezpitolok (another DC Comics Message Board refugee)
- Kitso Mobothi
- Terry Hammond
I like to think we don’t skimp on providing fair and thoughtful reviews, and doing that means taking care and investing time. Once or twice over the course of the decade I have thought about pulling down the shutters and turning the key in the lock, simply because that time has not been available. But I know that particularly with independent creators our reviews have been helpful, and it has occasionally given desperate writers a boost. It is not quite a selfless exercise in benefitting the creative comic book industry – after all, we usually get to read independent creators’ work for free – but I have smiled upon reading emails where a writer or artist has said thanks and been grateful that we took the time to analyse their work.
One of the ideas I had about halfway through the decade was that we should vacuum up the critiques written on other sites which over time have not survived. Some of that writing was good and it would be a shame if it was lost. The internet’s ephemeral nature does not care how much effort went into a critique: if the website is pulled down, then that is pretty much it. I started out on that exercise with an excellent comic book review website called The Fourth Rail, which from vague memory introduced me to Planetary. It was around for perhaps four or so years and I think was run by some comic shop owners in the US. However, while one of the owners of that redundant site seemed enthused and gave me permission to reproduce The Fourth Rail’s content, the other was not so much so, and as a consequence that project was dropped. If however there is anyone else who would like to park old content here as a repository then let me know.
I had this idea that this year I would physically publish some volumes of collected critiques from the site, one of which would be called Orbital Debris using an update of this infographic I commissioned from the amazing Charmaine Cave as cover art The Merry-Go-Round Goes Boom! – World Comic Book Review , and another consisting of reviews of Australian comics. But the exercise of self-publishing isn’t cheap, and I have neither the time nor patience for Kickstarter or Indie Go-Go. And so it’s been shelved. In the next month however there will be a ten year anniversary logo up on the site as part of quietly celebrating the passage of time.
Finally, thank you to our readership for reading. It is hard to know who you actually are. All I can tell from the backend of this WordPress-enabled site is that there are a surprising number of you – 262900 over the past ten years. Thanks to each of you quarter of a million people. (Remarkable!)
Best
DG Stewart
Perth, Australia