B'rett @ Comic Vine

As regular readers have surely noticed, I've been using Comic Vine as a source for images on posts for a few years now. I also feel that it's the best source for comic book character information on the web. Wikipedia does not specialize in comics, and in fact seems actively hostile toward the obscurities I deal in, like individual entries for Martian Manhunter villains. The Wikia DC Comics Database is helpful, but rather stingy with images and spotty on coverage. The late Don Markstein's Toonopedia is fabulous (or will be when it returns,) but paints broadly and highly (if entertainingly) subjective with its history. Comic Vine is the closest thing the internet has to Who's Who/The Official Marvel Handbook/ etc., and of course covers all publishers (or at least the sort super hero readers care about.)

Of course, part of the egalitarian nature of the site is that we all traffic in copyrighted material, and folks have regularly submitted my personal scans/commissions/original art to the site for years without bothering to ask me about it. If that sort of thing bothered me, I'd watermark my stuff, but it can be a bit galling at times. For instance, a number of pages feature Martian Manhunter-related entries using art from this blog, so I decided that they might as well have the related text content available as well, to spread Alien Atlas Awareness. I decided to sign up to perform this task, and ended up being accused of plagiarizing myself! I talked to a moderator about it, and despite the lack of policing of art, they do prefer that the text content be original to the site.

I share this with you for two reasons. One is that I'm really tired and don't feel like writing the Futureman entry into "Comrades of Mars" tonight. The other is that I will occasionally be writing new entries for Manhunter Family characters at Comic Vine, within the boundaries of their style guides, that I've agreed not to republish here. I do tend to drone on (see previous two paragraphs,) so readers might actually prefer these all-meat/no-bread entries to the stuff I host here. Since B'rett had no entry whatsoever, I started with him. Click here to read it, and please tell me what you think. I'm also posting "new" art for my Comic Vine entries, although these will typically be pieces I used for stuff like The Vile Menagerie Collage. A lot of those guys don't have feet, though, so we'll see as we go...