Comics, Everybody!

June 3, 2013 7:54 AM

On June 3rd, a week after AOL's announcement of the closure of Comics Alliance [previously], Townsquare Media Group opted to acquire the IP, in addition to three music sites focused on country, hip-hop and metal. In response to the turnaround, Comics Alliance opted to recount their change of fortune in sequential format.
posted by Smart Dalek (28 comments total)

I'm guardedly optimistic for CA (and the other former AOL properties), since Townsquare seems to be relatively unobtrusive. Did they confirm that everybody gets to keep or get back their jobs if they want? The Twitter accounts of the various members of the CA team don't seem to say.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:12 AM on June 3, 2013

The big splash picture at the end of the CA post features all the full-time staff (whom news articles are saying had their employment contracts purchased with the site) and most of the freelancers - I recognize David Brothers, Andrew Wheeler, Chris Sims, Bethany Fong and Matt Wilson.

(Also, the site was closed one month ago, not one week)
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:15 AM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

The relaunch happened so fas it wasn't even a relaunch - right now Comics Alliance still has the AOL banner at the top of the page. It looks like they just handed the keys over to the new owner.
posted by thecjm at 8:15 AM on June 3, 2013

If Ask Chris comes back, I will do a happy dance.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:18 AM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

If Ask Chris comes back, I will do a happy dance.

He's been doing a short-form version of it on his Tumblr, apart from a kick-ass extended post about how Bob Kane screwed over Bill Finger over credit for Batman.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:29 AM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

But.. but.. but.. I just removed the bookmark! Does this mean I should never remove bookmarks? I doan wanna be some sort of bookmark hoarder.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:33 AM on June 3, 2013

This post makes a great supplement to that Bob Kane thing, too. DC's bipolar relationship to Bill Finger was definitely a....a thing. Of some kind.

Also, Bob Kane's hilarious tombstone.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:35 AM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]

Yay!

/hopes it's not a zombie.
posted by Artw at 9:20 AM on June 3, 2013

Chris Sims and Matt Wilson's first new review is up. Looks like they're back for good.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:29 AM on June 3, 2013

David Brothers says that he is not coming back to CA.
posted by sleeping bear at 9:36 AM on June 3, 2013

Excellent news.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:36 AM on June 3, 2013

David Brothers says that he is not coming back to CA.

Always one of their more interesting writers. Good on him that he's doing something different - I look forwards to seeing what it is.
posted by Artw at 9:49 AM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also, Bob Kane's hilarious tombstone.

Old joke: It's actually Bill Finger buried there.
posted by Artw at 9:51 AM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]

Sims put out a call for Ask Chris questions, so it looks like that's happening too. It's unclear what the deal is going to be with those movie reviews; Sims and Wilson started an independent podcast, Movie Fighters, to continue them after CA died, and they're saying they won't just shut that down and return to written reviews, but that they will still have a column at CA. DOA was done before the shutdown, so it's not necessarily a taste of things to come.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:05 AM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Comics Alliance is back? HOORAY!!!

But, with respect to Mr. Sims and Mr. Wilson (Their movie reviews are awesome!), written articles are a hundred times better than podcasts. Articles are easier to absorb and less of an investment in the audience's time - an article might take five minutes to read, versus 10-15 minutes of listening for a podcast. And the jokes are always funnier in printed form.
posted by Kevin Street at 2:13 PM on June 3, 2013

Nah, WRA is awesome.
posted by Artw at 2:24 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

I forgot to mention: this is wonderful news for many reasons, but mainly because most comic book sites seem to be in a state of steep decline these days. Newsarama is a grinning skeleton of what it once was, and while Comic Book Resources still has a lot of good content, it seems to be more and more interested in TV and movie stories than comics. So Comics Alliance is a badly needed third voice.
posted by Kevin Street at 2:28 PM on June 3, 2013

!
posted by homunculus at 2:56 PM on June 3, 2013

Chris Sims and Matt Wilson's first new review is up. Looks like they're back for good.

This is all i care about. day made
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:24 PM on June 3, 2013

They are still doing the reviews!

And the tags still work too! Time to go read that Streetfighter review...
posted by Kevin Street at 6:31 PM on June 3, 2013

I just hope that the Ask Chris articles don't disappear down the memory hole. They are super handy to link to when having debates about Batman.
posted by painquale at 8:09 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Speaking of whom: The less-than-impressive way Man of Steel will connect to Batman
posted by homunculus at 8:11 PM on June 3, 2013

Update from Chris Sims on his personal web page:

In case you haven’t heard, ComicsAlliance returned today with most of the old staff — me included. After being shut down by AOL, the site (and the staff) were picked up by TownSquare Media along with a few other sites, and now, we’re back in action. And I have to admit, for me at least, this was pretty surprising.

I honestly didn’t think it was going to come back. If you’ve been following over the past month, you’ve probably seen me kick up the output that I was doing at Wired and get a few features in over at Cracked (the one about Surviving Edged Weapons is my personal favorite), and I’ve been talking to a lot of other people that were nice enough to reach out about getting me hired in various places. Matt and I had even decided to just go ahead and post the DOA review that’s up at CA now right here on the ISB. Seriously, it was already formatted and scheduled to post when I got the news.

It goes without saying, but I’m glad the site’s back. As for what I’m going to do, I figure it’s going to mostly be the same as it was before, with a few minor changes: Movie Fighters is going to continue independently with just me and Matt, but I have a couple of ideas on what might replace it over at CA. Ask Chris will be back in its regular slot, and everything else should run like we just had a month-long vacation where we were all terrified for most of it.

posted by zombieflanders at 4:14 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Everything else should run like we just had a month-long vacation where we were all terrified for most of it.

Heh. Every time I'm between jobs looks like that in retrospect, and I always end up kicking myself for freaking out instead of using the time to unwind.
posted by Artw at 5:47 AM on June 4, 2013

Looks like the vacation was good for somebody (and by "somebody" I mean "people who read comics"): David Brothers is strongly implying on Twitter that he is now some sort of Image Comics bigwig.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:59 AM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

The return of Ask Chris is glorious:

One of the more frustrating things about superhero comics is that unless your name is Ben Parker, death is really more of an inconvenience than a permanent state. If you can think of a character, odds are pretty good that they've come back from the dead at least once, and if the character that you're thinking of is one of the X-Men, we can go ahead and put those odds at a solid 100%. Seriously, I get that everyone had to be mad at Cyclops for killing Professor X for storyline reasons, but this is like the fourth time that has happened. At this point, that's less of a prison-for-life offense and more like a fifty-dollar ticket for Unlawful Foreshadowing Of A Future Event Comic.

To be fair, this isn't something that's unique to comics; shocking resurrections are going to be on the menu pretty much any time you're dealing with long-form sequential storytelling. If Tumblr had existed in 1891, I assure you that people would be losing their minds about how Doyle was cheapening the franchise by retconning The Final Problem and captioning their thoughts with an animated daguerrotype from The Brothers Super-Natural.

posted by zombieflanders at 9:57 AM on June 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

Bah, he didn't use my foodstamps one.
posted by Artw at 10:20 AM on June 7, 2013

The first ever comic book?
posted by homunculus at 5:27 PM on June 20, 2013