Fifteen Years Later...

I made an internet friend on the DC Comics Message Boards in the late '90s. Embarrassingly, you can still dig up some of our interactions on the Wayback Machine. In the year 2000, after he'd also become a mail order customer of my shop, paid for me to attend the San Diego ComiCon in a generous act involving a lot of other folks he knew virtually. We were probably something of a lifeline for an isolated ex-pat comic book fan in a foreign land with money to burn. He'd visited me once before in Houston, but I think it was during the San Diego trip that he gave me a CD. He'd used a then-novel softwear called a spiderbot to record my host of WebTV fan pages, collectively known as Martian Manhunter: The Rock of the JLA, and a bunch of other turn of the century fan material that it had offered links to and from. I still have it in an AOL DVD case somewhere, but when I went digging around for it just now, it wasn't readily available. Unfortunately, at the time the pages were in a state of disarray, with a number of images removed, never to be replaced. Still very grateful to have that artifact in my possession, presumably, I hope. We fell out of contact after I closed my shop, and soon after cancelled my WebTV subscription after getting an actual computer. I'm pretty confident those pages were immediately taken down, and MSN shut down the service in 2013. I tried checking the html address on the Internet Archive, which claims to have taken captures of it between 2000-05, but nothing actually comes upon. Might as well be another epoch.

I stumbled upon The Aquaman Shrine, a daily devotional blog, and thought I could bite the format while repurposing old material from the defunct WebTV pages. Never really got around to cannibalizing much. It's a pain in the ass to navigate the old Shrine as large pieces of it have been worn away with time, but there's thankfully still an "established 2006" badge to carbon date it. It's chief architect, Rob Kelly, turned over access to the Shrine's Twitter account to an unscrupulous individual who proceeded to steal it from him and change the locks. He'd also found a deeper love in podcasting, still producing several weekly shows to this day, and stopped posting to the blog a little less than five years ago. His podcasting partner, The Irredeemable Shag, was inspired by the Shrine and my own Idol-Head of Diabolu blogs to create Firestorm Fan. Like Rob, he hasn't posted to it in years, preferring podcasting. I started daily posting on September 1, 2007, never wholly managed to see that intent through, though I did manage 365 posts a year overall until giving out near the end of 2014. How many things have you more or less steadily maintained for seven straight years? It's no picnic, and obviously my efforts were less than stellar in those final months. I think the only member of our "Justice League Blogosphere" peer group to survive the (week)daily grind in Dr. Anj at Supergirl Comic Box Commentary, with twice my longevity at FOURTEEN years and counting.

What I can still say is that a decade & a half later, the blog isn't dead yet. I averaged six posts a month in 2015, 4 in 2016, 3 in 2018, merely monthly in 2019, and a couple or three a month since. I'm only averaging biweekly this year, though its more like runs of weekly posts followed by weeks/months of neglect. Given that Photobucket has finally all but given up on profiting from me, and mostly refusing service on my uploaded images, I though the anniversary would be a good month to clean up some old pages and offer a bunch of daily(?) "best of" re-posts until I lose interest or get squeezed by my own podcasting duties. I'm not sure why anyone is still here, given how long its been since DC has had a consistent, appreciable direction for J'Onn J'Onzz. I've recently been in the process of revisiting the early comics of my own Martian Manhunter fandom, in the wake of the 1996 JLA revival that inspired the WebTV pages. Maybe we're all just getting old and want to look back fondly on our perhaps wasted, largely unrealized and reciprocated affections for comic books and their heroes. We all probably should have made more productive use of our brief lives. But hey, I'm right there with you, and happy with whatever small remaining company I can keep in these parts.

More Maudlin Self-Mythologizing by Diabolu Frank

• Five Years Later...
• 4th Year of Diabolu
• Five Years After Five Years Later...
• Twenty Years Later...