Five Years Later...

Infamous words, if you're a Legion of Super-Heroes fan, and appropriate here. Welcome hypothetical reader to my J'Onn J'Onzz fan blog. This is a long time returning. You see, back around 1999, I used my WebTV to build a website originally called "Z'Onn Z'Orr: Home of the Martian Manhunter." This quickly morphed into "Martian Manhunter: The Rock of the JLA." I updated the site fairly regularly for two years, as it expanded to the point where it really taxed WebTV's capabilities to contain it. I built the site using a clunky program that forced me to do painful and lengthy editing any time I wanted to make changes. This process killed a lot of my passion, as did the crushing weight of transcribing the voluminous information I wanted to impart. At the same time, I was running my own comic shop, which I "inherited" with a good deal of debt that prevented me from pocketing much money. By the end, I was sick to death of the site, the business, my customers, poverty-- all of it. I closed the shop, took a vacation, and went into a more profitable profession (vague, since grounds keeper or school bus driver would qualify.) I bought an actual computer, dismantled the WebTV site, and swore to rebuild.

Yeah, that was never going to happen. The thought of all that HTML coding and the years it took me to even begin recovering from burn-out made it a non-issue. I drifted away from most of my comic reading friends, and just did my own thing. I'd wasted a number of years trolling message boards and such, a place I don't want to revisit. However, in the last year the itch to talk comics has returned, even though most are rather dreadful these days. I also started visiting other people's blogs, and was inspired by the format. Instead of trying to will the website I dreamt of into existence, I could just knock it out piecemeal for whoever bothered to stop by. If you're still reading, that would be you.

You might also wonder why I decided on another name change. For starters, while I still love the Martian Manhunter, he hasn't been my favorite comic book character in a long time. His three year long solo series was painfully bad for my taste, and things managed to get even worse since. It's also hard to be the anything of the JLA when you're not even on a division of that team anymore, a problem I faced when the secret headquarters Grant Morrison invented for J'Onn got tossed into the sun within John Ostrander's first year writing the character solo. I wanted something with permanence. I don't think any other character ever encountered the Idol-Head of Diabolu, a malevolent deus ex machina from J'Onn's 60's comics that would produce a new threat-of-the-issue every month as fodder for the Manhunter's adventures. It alludes to both an historical perspective (better days) and allows for tongue-in-cheek humor and snark. As I'm a bit of a Negative Nelly, it makes sense for my blog to take on the viewpoint of a villain, and it reads so much better than "Excerpts from the journal of Professor Arnold Hugo," don'tcha think?

I figure I should post some kind of image on the regular, and for a first addition, this is as good as any...

R.I.P.