2011, Year End Utilitarian Review

As our traffic bar graph above shows (click to enlarge), this has been an amazing year for HU. I thought I’d do a quick tour through some of the highlights.

Greatest Hits

There’s no doubt that the highlight of the year was Sean Michael Robinson and Joy DeLyria’s post in which they reimagined the Wire as a Victorian novel. Originally part of our Wire Roundtable, the post unexpectedly became a massive internet meme, picked up by everyone from Harper’s to the Baltimore Sun. It got more than 100,000 hits, and still, more than half a year later, is a fixture in our most popular posts list. A massive chunk of that leap in traffic up there is because of Sean and Joy’s post. I doubt we’ll ever reach those heights again, honestly…which is maybe for the best, as they busted our server.

Sean and Joy also landed a book contract on the strength of the post; the book should be out in a couple of months, I believe. Sean and Joy also had a post about Wuthering Heights, Unicorns, and joys of the publishing process, while Sean (by himself this time) had a nice piece about how being a meme affected his artistic process.

The other major traffic generator this year was Robert Stanley Martin’s International Best Comics Poll. More than 200 cartoonists, academics, critics, and other comics industry folk submitted lists to determine the 10 greatest comics of all time. Robert put an enormous amount of effort into organizing the poll, most visible maybe in the carefully annotated lists for every participant. It was a fantastic project, and HU was very lucky that Robert decided to run it here, and that so many other folks put in their time and energy to make it work.

Another post which drew a lot of attention this year was Nadim Damluji’s discussion of Craig Thompson’s Habibi and Orientalism. The post sparked a long, occasional series of responses, including Nadim’s interview with Thompson.

Finally, this didn’t generate tons of traffic, but one of the things I’m most proud of this year was our Illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable. A whole host of talented cartoonists and artists drew works inspired by Wallace Stevens poems. I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out.

Kicked to the Curb

As some of you may remember, we started out this year as part of Tcj.com. In February, there was a shake up over there and we were fired with two weeks notice. Derik Badman did an amazing job setting up a new space for us, including engineering this site redesign you’re looking at. Thanks also to Edie Fake for creating our awesome oozy banner.

I talked about our year at tcj.com here, and commented on the pros and cons of their changed direction here. Finally, Mike Hunter eulogized the end of the TCJ message board.

More! More! More!

Here’s a sample of some other memorable moments from throughout the year.

Richard Cook on the Marvel Swimsuit issue.

Ng Suat Tong’s juried selection of theBest Online Comics Criticism.

Matt Seneca’s interview of CF.

My interview of Sharon Marcus, focusing on queer theory, lesbian identity and (of course) Wonder Woman.

An unexpected visit by Diamanda Galas, Evil Bitch Fist and Party of One.

An extensive roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec.

Tom Crippen presented a number of galleries of work by the cartoonist and illustrator Robert Binks.

Throughout the year we’ve had a bunch of posts on Twilight, of all things.

Tom Gill with a massive post on Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu and fetuses in the sewer.

Anja Flower on the queer, interspecies allure of Edward Gorey.

Mahendra Singh on Jeffrey Catherine Jones.

My essay on Wonder Woman, superdicks, and Christ.

Yoshimichi Majima and Timothy Finney on questions about the original art sold by Manga Legends,

Kinukitty on Stevie Nicks.

A series of posts on R. Crumb and race, including Domingos Isabelinho’s post on the work ofAlan Dunn.

A roundtable on Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

Qiana Whited on Blues and Comics.

A blog crossover on Cable/Soldier X with Tucker Stone.

Ng Suat Tong Anders Nilson’s Big Questions.

Anne Ishii on Miyazaki and women in the animation industry.

A roundtable on the Drifting Classroom.

A roundtable on Jaime Hernandez and his critics.

Erica Friedman on what’s the big deal about Sailor Moon.

A series of posts by James Romberger on Alex Toth.

A (still-ongoing!) roundtable organized by Caroline Small on Godard. This included the amazing shot-by-shot remake of Breathless by Warren Craghead.

And, of course, an occasional series of downloadable music mixes.

Utilitarian Future

We’re going to finish up the Godard roundtable, I know; there’s been agitation for a Jaime Hernandez roundtable; we may have some sort of celebration in September of our 5-year anniversary (presuming we make it that far!) — and beyond that, we’ll see. Thanks to all our writers, commenters, and readers for making 2011 a great year at HU. We’ll see you tomorrow to get started on 2012!

28 thoughts on “2011, Year End Utilitarian Review

  1. Regarding Mike Hunter’s nice little eulogy about the end of the TCJ message board, the TCJ folks have now even stripped away the “frozen in amber” archives. So, for all intents and purposes, once the “ghost caches” of Google and other search engines are gone, it will be as if one of the liveliest and most scholarly comics-related places on the Web for more than a decade never existed.

    Despite the “headaches” it may have caused the folks at Fantagraphics, I think Kim Thompson and the others who opted to kill the TCJ message board made a dumb mistake. Even worse, however, was the curious decision to strip away every vestige of the board’s existence — unless, maybe, keeping the archive server space was costing them dough.

  2. “I think Kim Thompson and the others who opted to kill the TCJ message board made a dumb mistake.”

    How is it a dumb mistake if they hated it, save time and money, hardly any one misses it, and if TCJ.com is more popular than ever?

  3. Yeah, it doesn’t seem like a business mistake, exactly. It’s a shame from a scholarship/historical perspective that they aren’t going to keep the archive available, if that’s the case.

  4. Ng Suat Tong wrote: “How is it a dumb mistake if they hated it, save time and money, hardly any one misses it, and if TCJ.com is more popular than ever?”

    Until you present some hard evidence that the traffic on the old TCJ message board during its heyday was substantially less than it is now, I don’t see how you could possibly make such an unsubstantiated, declarative statement — particularly if one does even a cursory check of the posts currently on tcj,com.

    Of the dozen or so posts featured on the main page right now, most have just a handful of comments. Some have none at all. Only one had more than 20 comments. Compared to the bustling action on the old TCJ message boards, those are pretty apathetic numbers — especially considering that the current posts are much more formal and essay-driven than the message board posts were.

  5. Russ, one of the problems is that comments don’t really tell you that much about traffic. Message boards encourage people to have conversations; essays are more things you read and don’t necessarily chat about.

    Tcj.com’s google page rank is 6, which is what it’s been for the last couple of years at least, I think. It’s a pretty rough estimate, but it suggests their numbers haven’t fallen substantially with cutting the message board, anyway. And I think the site certainly has a lot more respect and general good will than it did when we were there (though that’s more about the design and editorial than about the message board per se.) I think it’s hard to make the case that dropping the board really hurt them either in terms of visitors or reputation (which isn’t to say that the board was worthless or that they didn’t lose something by cutting it.)

  6. —————————–
    R. Maheras says:

    …it will be as if one of the liveliest and most scholarly comics-related places on the Web for more than a decade never existed.
    ——————————

    Yes; when commenting recently at TCJ.com, I considered saying it was sent down the “memory hole,” yet held off lest the Fanta folks become outraged over supposedly being equated with Big Brother.

    As with 1984, though, what that erasure does (among other things) is that no one will be able to see for themselves what the message board was actually like; and the characterization from the loudest voices will prevail.

    With the people who did have serious discussions, who spent hours on thoughtful write-ups or scanning and posting artwork they’d discovered to share, who put time in answering researchers’ questions, offering technical or artistic advice, all getting “slimed” as being a feces-slinging bunch of monkeys. With the occasional crass behavior assumed to somehow spread through and infect the whole. (Kim Thompson: “Take a barrel of wine and add a cup of sewage, and what you have is sewage.” Tom Spurgeon: “how much fecal matter makes you not want to drink a glass of milk”)

    I admire and appreciate the work done by Thompson and Spurgeon, but on the issue of the TCJ message board, their perspective on the whole is drastically affected by what they found irritating about it. I’ve read that if you become a cop, after a while your attitude is that all blacks are niggers, all women are whores, all young people are scum; because that’s the distorted attitude that having to deal with the worst behavior, day in and day out, creates.

    So we end up with perceptions of the message board as being…

    ——————————-
    Kim Thompson says:

    …a community of 12-year-olds who were two months behind on their Ritalin. I have zero doubt that an open message board will degenerate into a swamp of nonsense, flame wars, feuds, in-jokes, and acting out. The previous Comics Journal message board made me hate humanity for the duration of its existence.
    ——————————-

    Jeez; rather than noxious online behavior, it’s things like genocide, female genital mutilation, the blithe driving of countless species into extinction, whitewashing the suffering of the poor and torture victims, the perpetual triumph of lies and stupidity over truth and intelligence that make me hate the human race.

    And, it would be a nonpoliced open message board that would deteriorate thus. In the same fashion that a neglected city park would end up filled with trash, a haven for hookers, crime, and drug deals. Does that mean that parks are automatically a noxious thing that deserve to be eliminated, and replaced by, say, food courts in malls?

    (At least, over at http://www.tcj.com/live-from-little-torch-key/ , he used the more accurate “All unsupervised message boards devolve into horribleness.”)

    The thing is, it’s not as if — as is generally conceded — there ever was consistent, substantial effort put at policing the place. When I suggested that regular readers who’d proved themselves responsible could be granted powers to aid in keeping order (deleting offensive posts, issuing warnings), thereby filling in when the overworked Fanta people could not (and others had suggested this too), the idea was predictably ignored.

    ——————————–
    R. Maheras says:

    Despite the “headaches” it may have caused the folks at Fantagraphics, I think Kim Thompson and the others who opted to kill the TCJ message board made a dumb mistake. Even worse, however, was the curious decision to strip away every vestige of the board’s existence — unless, maybe, keeping the archive server space was costing them dough.
    ———————————-

    I imagine there might have been some cost; though the attitude about the message board at Fantagraphics is so passionately venomous, I’m not surprised they wished to have every vestige of its existence erased.

    Just noticed something too rich not to point out:

    ———————————–
    spurgeonsofmuncie says:

    Comparing me to a Fox News Anchor who lies to make a political point is the kind of asinine argumentation no one will miss seeing more regularly now that the board is gone….It seems an entirely fitting memorial to its passing that its few remaining adherents refuse to acknowledge that a lot of people really did find it a uniquely horrible place.
    ———————————-
    http://www.tcj.com/live-from-little-torch-key/

    (???) Who is refusing to acknowledge that? Who could possibly ignore the oceans of bile about the TCJ message board splashing and foaming away?

    Thus, the “Fox News Anchor”-type distortion is employed, in the very same paragraph that it is denied. Featuring the equivalent of saying (reality be damned), “those liberals can never find anything to say about what’s right with America!”

    ———————————
    R. Maheras says:

    Of the dozen or so posts featured on the main page [of TCJ.com] right now, most have just a handful of comments. Some have none at all. Only one had more than 20 comments. Compared to the bustling action on the old TCJ message boards, those are pretty apathetic numbers — especially considering that the current posts are much more formal and essay-driven than the message board posts were.
    ———————————-

    …And I’ve noticed that after a while, the comments are deleted! Why bother making more than a cursory “That was a really awesome article” remark, if it’ll just get flushed away?

  7. I don’t think the comments are deleted…? The comments on the original message board argument post over there are all in place, for example…? It may be something to do with loading comments slowly perhaps?

  8. …But I’ve looked at other old articles (like one Habibi critique, for instance), and the comments that once accompanied it are not to be seen.

    There are just links to related Facebook and Twitter stuff; why not just put one of those “old farts buzz off” spotty smartphone glyphs?

  9. Did they really kill the message board or just neglect to adjust a setting? Have they said they killed it? Tim Hodler told me they weren’t aware of any problem until I emailed them.

    Like I said before on TCJ, message board software is free. Rather than bitching and moaning, start your own.

  10. Mike–

    It’s not going to be organized in any coherent way, but you should be able to find random pages from the messageboard at http://www.archive.org. It’ll help if you have the specific URLs for the pages. No guarantees that they’ll be there, but they might be. There are lots of old tcj.com pages over there, like the writers guidelines that say, “Articles will not be permanently archived on the website without permission,” and other things the TCJ folk want disappeared.

  11. I”ve seen several people say “start your own.” I think that kind of misses what was valuable in the message board. TCJ is a big name; it has a long and venerable tradition as a center of comics criticism and discussion. As a result, it was a place that lots of industry people and fans hung out. The whole value of a message board is in the community; some random person starting up their own random message board isn’t going to have that kind of community.

    Which isn’t to say at all that tcj was obligated to continue the message board or anything if they didn’t value it. Just pointing out that it was unique for various reasons, and not readily replaceable (which is a good thing if you thought the board was a blight, obviously.)

  12. Out of curiosity, what specifically is prompting all this bile from people about the messageboard? I remember the Ted Rall/Danny Hellman conflict getting really ugly over there, but what else?

  13. There were plenty of ugly flame wars even in just the time I poked around there (which wasn’t all that long.) The board really wasn’t moderated almost at all, and people could be nasty.

    There were lots of good things about it too, but folks aren’t insane to remember problems.

  14. Steven Samuels wrote: “Like I said before on TCJ, message board software is free. Rather than bitching and moaning, start your own.”

    You are looking at the TCJ message board from a totally different perspective than I.

    I was a supporter of “The Comics Journal” (formerly “The Nostalgia Journal”) from Day 1. I was one of their first subscribers, and I welcomed their entry into the comics community fold. While I did not always agree with the critiques and commentary in TCJ, I greatly respected Groth and company for their philosophy of openness and refusal to pull punches about sensitive issues affecting the comics business.

    Their long-running letter column, “Blood and Thunder,” was an extension of that philosophy, and many of the issues and exchanges discussed in that forum were epic.

    When TCJ went electronic, the message board, as Mike points out, didn’t just become a spinoff of “Blood and Thunder,” it eclipsed it so much, B&T became irrelevent and died.

    However, the difference between the old B&T letter columns and the now defunct TCJ message board is that all of those letter columns are available in TCJ back issues for persual by scholars and researchers. Not so with the TCJ message board archives.

    In effect, what has happened is that the people I used to trust for providing an open and public forum for comics-related issues have become censors — erasing more than a decade of valuable discussions by what was arguably the most knowledeable comics folks around.

    “Starting your own discussion site” won’t mask that loss.

    If the data is still stored on a hard drive somewhere, what the folks at Fantagraphics folks should do is turn over their message board archives to some impartial, scholarly third party who will make those archives available and searchable for future generations.

  15. Russ, I understand your anger, but I really don’t know that they’ve intentionally deleted the archives. It sounds like it may be a technical glitch….let me try to find out a little more….

  16. Personally, the things that I regret about the changeover at tcj are the fact that they couldn’t find a place for Dirk Deppey, one of the smartest and most unique voices in comics criticsm, and that the decision to get rid of associated blogs contributed to the death of the Panelists before it really got off the ground. Against that is the fact that tcj.com is finally the professional and valuable resource it always should have been. So overall, I think Dan and Tim’s tenure has been a huge plus, though there’s inevitably going to be some downsides.

    Kind of a humbling for me that a post on HU’s year ends up in a discussion of tcj.com.

  17. Okay, I just emailed Tim Holder. As I suspected, the disappearance of the message board archive is just a glitch. They’re working on fixing it (work on it got delayed by the holidays, it sounds like.)

  18. Yeah, they had a wordpress error visible on the page for a whole bunch of months.

    If there’s one thing TCJ’s been weak at over the years, it’s on the marketing side of things. At least that’s the impression that I get. On things like Journalista and the messboard, I get the impression that they were passive on pushing back against any decline in ad revenue that set in. Granted its been a tough couple of years, but even then there are a bunch of strategies one can employ internet-wise for maximizing (or attempting to maximize) the ad revenue.

  19. If the message board disappearance was just a “glitch,” that’s welcome news. But the fact that the glitch hasn’t been addressed in so long is an pretty glaring indicator that the gatekeepers of this information regard it as more of a nuisance than anything else.

    In their defense, at least the Fantagraphics folks took steps to index and make available online portions of TCJ magazine archives — something I implored them to do on several occasions.

    I did the same with the folks at “Comics Buyer’s Guide” — even going so far as sending them high resolution scans of the covers of their first 400 issues — in the hopes that they would expand their online achives. They have a work in progress that initially went up a few years ago, but there’s still quite a bit more to be done there.

    Frankly, I wish I had the time to set up a scholarly Web site myself featuring a wide variety of fan and fanzine-related info, commentaries, message board exchanges and indexes, but since comics-related endeavors have never paid my bills, that still remains a pipe dream.

  20. In their defense, at least the Fantagraphics folks took steps to index and make available online portions of TCJ magazine archives

    This is a source of aggravation for me and a few others who have written for them.

    The material in TCJ that comes from outside contributors doesn’t belong to the magazine. The deal is that TCJ has six-months exclusivity. After that, the writers, since they keep the copyright, can do whatever they want with the pieces. This includes, in theory, not allowing TCJ or Fantagraphics to reprint it. The TCJ archives are taking advantage of a court-created loophole in the copyright law that allows publishers to reprint material in perpetuity as long as they restrict it to photocopies of the original publication’s pages.

    Even so, it’s not clear that TCJ has the right to do this without the contributors’ approval. The writers guidelines page they posted online in 2002 states, “Articles will not be permanently archived on the website without permission.” One can see a 2009 screenshot of the page here at archive.org. It’s the final sentence in the third paragraph from the bottom.

    They’ve since put up a different writers guidelines page that states material “may be permanently archived online.” However, they didn’t take the old one down for the longest time. It could still be accessed through the TCJ website as late as last July.

    I’ve talked to other contributors about this, but none has ever received any notice of a policy change. For my part, when I started writing for TCJ in late 2008, I was never directed to any writers guidelines page or otherwise provided with its text.

    Gary Groth’s response to my confronting him with the first guidelines page was, and I quote, “it is perfectly obvious that–even if at all relevant here–that sentence addresses the archiving of individual articles standing alone and has nothing whatever to do with the reproduction of entire issues of TCJ.” He additionally told me that if I wanted to pursue the matter further I should take it up with Fantagraphics’ lawyer.

    As far as I’m concerned, a promise to not permanently archive articles online is a promise to not permanently archive articles online, regardless of the form of presentation. Hiding behind lawyers and legalistic sophistry in order to swindle authors is the sort of conduct that I recall Groth used to denounce.

    I stopped writing for TCJ because of a series of payment problems that got progressively worse over time. I ultimately had to threaten them with a small-claims suit to get them to more or less resolve their debts. For this and other reasons, I have a very low opinion of Groth and company, and I don’t want them engaging in any further publication of my work. As for some contributors I’ve spoken to, they would just as soon not see their tyro efforts kept in print. Others feel promises that “Articles will not be permanently archived on the website without permission” should be honored. There are of course contributors who don’t care one way or the other.

    I support TCJ’s archiving of the news sections and other material in the magazine that they own. But they should either get permission from the contributors for the other stuff or leave it be.

    Sorry to go on so long, but this is a sore point on my end.

  21. RSM — The archiving of entire issues — especially to re-sell or otherwise make money from — as “Mad” did in 1999 with its entire run of magazines up to that point in time, is obviously problematic for creators when no permission or compensation is involved.

    One would think Fantagraphics would be more sensitive to such things than are the traditional publishers with work-for-hire arrangements.

    I think, from a scholarly and/or indexing point of view, reprinting covers and spot portions of an issue fall under the “fair use” provision of the copyright law.

    But if there is some sort of limited printing rights arrangement with creators, and a publisher then unilaterally reprints an entire back issue that is not yet in public domain, that’s a no-no.

    And now there’s the new Internet Age wrinkle: Traditional publishers who immediately archive an entire newly published issue online in perpetuity via a PDF, or online publishers who routinely archive columns chronologically as newer ones replace them.

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for copyright law to catch up with those or other new technology-driven realities.

  22. —————————-
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Kind of a humbling for me that a post on HU’s year ends up in a discussion of tcj.com.
    —————————

    Sorry about that! Threads do go off course; and HU is a worthy and admirable entity in its own right. But that message board was a pretty important part of the lives of some of us here for many years, so excuse us if we get exercised when its corpse gets pissed on yet again.

    ———————–
    I”ve seen several people say “start your own.” I think that kind of misses what was valuable in the message board. TCJ is a big name; it has a long and venerable tradition as a center of comics criticism and discussion. As a result, it was a place that lots of industry people and fans hung out. The whole value of a message board is in the community; some random person starting up their own random message board isn’t going to have that kind of community.
    ————————-

    Yes, exactly. Likewise, those who point out there are still discussions about comics going on in assorted Facebook pages and scattered blogs miss out the fragmentation involved. The TCJ message board was a significant gathering place for those serious about comics (with its share of noxious fools). Those who tried to find an equivalent, then and now, report nothing quite compared.

    Alas, the zeitgeist has probably changed by now too, with people ever more isolated from diverging viewpoints, Twittering away to their small groups…

    ————————-
    There were plenty of ugly flame wars even in just the time I poked around there (which wasn’t all that long.) The board really wasn’t moderated almost at all, and people could be nasty.

    There were lots of good things about it too, but folks aren’t insane to remember problems.
    —————————

    Certainly, there was a fair amount of nastiness. (Kid stuff compared to what goes on routinely in real life.) But, rather than the “take a barrel of wine and add a cup of sewage, and what you have is sewage” situation, it was more like finding the occasional dog turds along your daily walk, which — though you couldn’t escape the scent — you could simply step around.

    And with a little encouragement, “the better angels of our nature” could prevail there. Late in the life of the message board, Dave Sim was doing an “internet tour” promoting his then-new titles, Judenhass and Glamourpuss. I suggested that when the scheduled date came along for him to visit the TCJ message board, rather than rehash all the women-are-the-Void stuff that The Comics Journal and everybody else had been raking him over the coals over for years, it would be more interesting and productive for us there to take the opportunity of addressing one of the most talented comics creators around about his art, his new projects. Lo and behold, civility held sway; fascinating questions were asked, and answered…

    —————————–
    Okay, I just emailed Tim Holder. As I suspected, the disappearance of the message board archive is just a glitch. They’re working on fixing it (work on it got delayed by the holidays, it sounds like.)
    ——————————

    That’s quite a relief. I wish that, when I mentioned it at TCJ.com, somebody would’ve bothered to explain

    —————————–
    R. Maheras says:

    If the message board disappearance was just a “glitch,” that’s welcome news. But the fact that the glitch hasn’t been addressed in so long is an pretty glaring indicator that the gatekeepers of this information regard it as more of a nuisance than anything else.
    ——————————

    Yes; even when the message board was “alive,” that it was “off the air” for weeks when the previous incarnation of TCJ.com was being put up, indicates how low a priority it was. We can see in TV-land how the audience of a show that’s doing OK in the ratings can be ravaged by frequent preemptions and schedule changes. With the myriad distractions available on the Web, no wonder this kind of stuff further damaged attendance there.

    —————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Personally, the things that I regret about the changeover at tcj are the fact that they couldn’t find a place for Dirk Deppey, one of the smartest and most unique voices in comics criticism…
    —————————-

    …And his stint as Comics Journal editor was splendid, the proverbial “breath of fresh air”!

    Checking to see what Dirk’s been up to, I found http://twitter.com/deppey , featuring delights such as…

    http://twitter.com/#!/timcarvell/status/154007184496263168/photo/1

    “What if Dr. Seuss had adapted H.P. Lovecraft‘s horrific masterpiece, The Call of Cthulhu?” http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/dr-seuss-versus-h-p-lovecraft_b39937

    —————————–
    Robert Stanley Martin says:

    The material in TCJ that comes from outside contributors doesn’t belong to the magazine…
    —————————-

    Thanks for adding that information and those personal experiences. While certainly — from a scholarly point of view — it’d be great to have EVERYTHING accessible online, it’s vitally important that the interests and wishes of those who create that “content” be protected and respected…

  23. Hey Noah — Don’t feel humbled by the direction of these (or any) comments about other sites. As Mike said, this is a worthy and admirable site — which is why we’re all here. Regarding the new TCJ site, I go there only about once a month or so, and I don’t think I’ve commented there in at least six months. The TCJ comment section is pretty much a dead fish now compared to its past incarnations, so I figure, what’s the point?.

  24. The Wallace Stevens link is not working.

    It was definitely my favorite part of HU this part year. More more more! (That video from it is still one of my favorite artworks ever.)

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