More Intecredible Internet Guide... stuff!

OK, in case you're new to this blog, here's the deal: A few weeks back, I picked up a copy of "The Incredible Internet Guide to Comic Books and Superheroes" for a buck at Half-Price Books. Since the idea of a book featuring pages and pages of website listings is, on the face of it, absurd (after all, sites disappear, hosts disappear, etc.) I decided to mock the very idea of it by going through the book and looking up every single website it lists...

To date, I've learned that of the free web space sites, Xoom.com is definitely gone. And Tripod pages, assuming they actually exist, take way too long to load.

So, we're up to... Wallpaper

Hero's Home: Downloads is gone. The Inner Circle: Wallpapers of Gambit and Rogue, is gone... and so is the host site. The Iron Man Software site is gone (as is the host). Page of Apocalypse: Wallpapers is an Angelfire site... and that's gone... SpideyDude's Spider-Man Wallpaper site was on Xoom... and the Witchblade Files (yet another of these sites where individual pages were listed on several different pages) is gone.

So.... none of the wallpaper sites are still up.

Software: Icons

The Amalgam Fan Art II page... well, that was listed on a previous page of this book, and it's still gone! BAMF Central: Nightcrawler multimedia is gone. The Green Arrow People Face Icons page is gone. The Iron Man Software site... which was listed in Wallpaper... is of course, gone. And Hero's Home is listed in this section AGAIN! The Deep: Downloadable Fathom Files is gone. The X: X-Men Icons is gone. The Witchblade Files... hey, that was also just listed in Wallpaper! Sheesh. And the book also lists "X Icons" -- which is the EXACT SAME WEBSITE as The X: X-Men Icons! Not even a different page of that now non-existant site!

Miscellaneous Software

This oughtta be good...

the cDATA 2000 Comic Book database program page is history! Colorize - Coloring Software is out of here! So is the Comic Master Shareware Inventory Software page! The original page listed for ComicBase is gone... but you can find the correct site here... making this the FIRST actual site I've found tonight!

However... the FD Comics site? Gone. The Realms of Wonder Comic Tracking System is gone.

It hasn't been updated in about ten years, but Software for Use with Champions Roleplaying Game is still up!

Of course, they listed ONCE AGAIN the Deep and Witchblade Files pages. There's also a page for the X-Men - The Ravages of Apocolypse Demo for Quake, but that appears to be gone (as would any demo software from 2000 anyway, right)?

So, three sections of listings, and only two sites are still up!

Jon

Steranko History of Comics, Vol. 1 & 2

So, as I often do when funds are tight, and I haven't any fresh reading material, I've been doing some re-reading of books I haven't read in some time...



I just finished re-reading volume 1, and will probably start re-reading volume 2 tomorrow.



These are great volumes... but honestly, my copies are kind of beat up... and I would absolutely love it if somehow, some way, they could be reissued, in a revised and expanded edition... perhaps even with the third volume, which has been teased at more than a few times!

Of course, the revised and expanded edition should still be in multiple volumes, but with a slipcover case... and ideally, with enlarged posters of those wonderful covers!

That's all for tonight.

Jon

More Incredible Internet Guide... searching!

So... we're up to Special Galleries, which the book describes as "devoted to images of a particular topic or creator..."

The first site, AdamWarren.com, is gone, history, kaput. The Alpha Flight Coloring Book is likewise gone from Geocities. So is the ASCII X-Men art page. The Ballistic Swimsuit Special Page never loaded. The BatGallery is gone, as is the host site. Batman Pictures is also gone. The ChrisBachalo.com gallery is history. The Dawn Gallery is gone, as is Freakygirlz.com.

What was formerly the Daily Bugle Photo Lab is now The Avengers Cover Gallery.

If you're a fan of Death and Sandman from the Vertigo line, you might want to check out Death & Sandman Images (wow, two sites in a row that still work!).

The Frank Miller Gallery, however, is long gone (you'd think the writer of this book would realize that any site that was on a .edu site would only be there as long as that person was a student at that college).

The Gen13 & Witchblade Gallery is still up.

Then there's a batch of sites that were at Images Central, which appears to be long gone: Backlash, Code-Name Strykeforce, Cyberforce, Stormwatch, Wetworks, WildCATs, Wildcore...

The Images Unplugged site is gone. So, sadly, is the Jerry Ordway Web Gallery and the whole of shazam.imginc.com. Also gone is the Lady Pendragon Gallery, MadKomix Superhero Art Gallery, Marvel Comics Sample Card Image Gallery, and Marvel Posters sites. As well as the Overpower Scans Page.

The Pictures of Donna Troy page is still there -- wasn't that already listed in this book?

But the Pure Excitement Comics' Gallery of Golden Age Heroes page is gone, as well as Rick's Pics.

The Savage Dragon Gallery isn't at the link listed in the book... you'll have to go to the main page and click "Sketchbook" to get to it.

The PhoeniX Custom Marvel Airbrushed T-Shirts site is gone... possibly taken down by Marvel's attorneys! The Unofficial Comics Database isn't what it used to be... the Unofifical Teen Titans Homepage is gone... The Witchblade Pics site is one of those .edu sites, so I won't even check it out... and the Woulter's Spawn Gallery is also gone.

Jon

More Incredible Guide... stuff!

So, we're up to Professional Art Pages, and the book says, "The sites in this list offer comic fans the chance to view unfinished art and other professional comic artwork." Yeah, whatever.

The ComicQuest Original Art Page, Erik Larsen Original Art Gallery, Ivan's Comic Art Page, and the whole of Megatonman.com are gone.

But The Offficial Randy Green Fan Club is still up! (whoever Randy Green is... I haven't a clue)

The Original Comic Art Online site is still up, but hasn't been updated in over a year.

But the Private Gallery of Reckless Abandon (Pro Sketches of Captain America) is gone.

On the other hand, T's World of Original Art & Comics is still up and running!

So, that's three sites out of eight still up... pretty good, compared to the rest of this book so far!

Jon

Brief Notes...

Finished collecting TV comics covers tonight...

...but while doing it, I discovered that an upcoming column for Cover Stories at World Famous Comics was going to have a major mistake in it! Namely, one of the "Comics They Never Made" installments of "Drive-In Movie Classics"!

I had an issue featuring an adaptatio of X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes... which was supposedly the 14th issue or so, in 1964, of that ficticious title. Problem is, in 1963, Gold Key did a one-shot adapation of it!

So I added a few sentences to explain it away, and sent the revised column off to Justin.

Anyway...

Last night, when I discovered the error, I loaded up the Archive website to see if it had already run, and then I learned that somehow, not all the graphics for the Archive were uploaded!

So, I was up late last night sending the missing graphics...

Jon

A Quick Note...

...to explain why I haven't posted in the last five days...

Some of you may know that I usually post stuff to the DC History Yahoo Group (you can join it here), usually in some kind of theme, and for about the last year, it's been 1-10, in which I post the first ten issues of various comics titles.

Well, I'm nearing the end of the 1-10's I haven't posted... so I needed some new thing to start collecting... and since I've been running out of ideas for Comics They Never Made covers (which I post first on my weekly Cover Stories column before archiving them at Comics They Never Made: The Official Archive), I figured I needed to do some more research to find out for sure what TV shows were made into comics...

So, to accomplish both of these things, I've been collecting scans from the Grand Comics Database of comics covers based on TV shows.

And that's what's been eating so much of my time the last five days or so.

Nearly done, though, so I should be returning to my usual posting soon... at least until the next round of transcription work for Andy Mangels and BCI/Eclipse!

Jon

More Incredible Internet Guide... Stuff!

Sheesh, I've taken five days off from blogging?

Photo Manipulation

These seem to be very popular... fans take scans of sexy women and use Photoshop to clothe them as superheroines (any sites that still work are probably not work safe).

I think I mentioned in a previous post that Lori McDonald's site (and the host site, hostme.com) is dead... now I can say that Aspira Ad Astra and the host site, scifi-fantasy.com are also dead. Bad Mojo's Shrine of Heroes is gone. Club 411's page on AOL is gone. The Comic Art Gallery is at http://members.tripod.com/~Andrew_Goh/index-1.html if you want to try it for yourself, but as I've posted before, I don't even bother checking Tripod sites.

The "Comic Book Babes Brought to Life" page on homepage.com is gone. The Comics2Film page is still up, but not where the book says it is (I'm not spending time looking for it... just go to their website and find the link. The Digital Sketchpad page has a forward put on it, but the new location is dead, dead, dead.

However... Drivle's Bizaar is still up! And unlike most of these kind of sites, it's all male characters.

DroopyD's site was on Xoom, so you know it's dead. But the Flyin' Ryan Gallery is still there! The "Help! I've Been Digitally Manipulated Webring" seems to be gone... or at least the main page is.

The Hurricane Season Graphics page is gone -- or at least the webjump.com site is, which appears to be one of those forwarding sites. Kerry Smith's Girls of Steel site was on Xoom. But Live Action Comics is still there! But the M4 Studios site is gone. The More Sexy Superheroes site is gone. The Ray's Superheroines site is gone. The Real Heroes? website is gone. The Super Guys page is gone, as is the companion Super Ladies page. The Superangelic Hunting Grounds page was on Xoom. The Superheroines of the Silver Age page is gone. And bizarrely enough, the Superladies site listed in the book is the exact same site as was listed just three sites before on the same page! And the last listing for this category, Surliman the Sorcerer's Inner Sanctum, is also gone.

If you really want to check out some working sites with this kind of stuff... you can click here. There's probably tons of other working sites out there.

Jon