Category: Comics

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After last week’s Smallville episode, “Justice,” featured Cyborg, Aquaman, Green Arrow and the Flash Impulse, there was another spike in traffic to my Flash site and the profile of Bart Allen, Smallville Edition.

Daily traffic to Flash section for January 2007, showing a 1.5× jump on Jan. 18

It jumped up to 1½ times the usual number of visits on the day “Justice” aired, then quickly started trailing off to normal levels. It’s nowhere near as big a jump as last time the Flash appeared on the show, when I saw a threefold spike in traffic for the first two days.

Why the difference? I’ve got several theories:

  • Interest in Smallville has waned over time, so fewer people dropped in. Pure speculation.
  • Viewers remembered Bart from “Run” (which was rerun a few weeks ago) and many didn’t feel the need to look him up again. Again, speculation.
  • Bart was sharing the limelight with other guest stars this time. But I’d expect people to look for all of them, which is borne out by the number of people who have searched the site for Green Arrow in the past week.
  • Overall site traffic is higher, causing the jump to be less noticeable. Wishful thinking, but the last spike hit ~7,600 hits/day, while this one hit ~8,200, so the numbers hold up. (Hits & bandwidth are down for the Flash section, but I’ve done several rounds of optimization in the last few years.)
  • Fewer sources linked to the site. Last time, there were lots of links from forums and blogs. I even got linked from Television Without Pity. (They decided to go with Wikipedia instead.) This time around, it was mostly search engine hits.

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Bart as Impulse in 'Justice'With Bart Allen returning to Smallville tonight—alongside Cyborg, Green Arrow, and Aquaman—I find myself wondering about the best way to hang onto just a few episodes. Last night I went looking for my tape of “Run,” the first episode in which he appeared, and I couldn’t find it.

I have no interest in buying full seasons of Smallville, but I’d like to have copies of the two episodes with Bart (partly for character research, partly for completism). Warner Bros. has no reason to release individual episode DVDs, but downloadable episodes (as in iTunes) might be an option.

Another possibility: themed collections. There have been enough episodes guest-starring other DC heroes that WB could do something similar to Buffy‘s Slayer Collection, or The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” set. A single disc featuring, let’s say, the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman episodes (Green Arrow might need his own disc), followed by tonight’s big team-up, “Justice.”

Hey, I’d buy it.

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[Flash Logo]A post on the Comic Bloc Forums the other day made me think about the question: Which Flash had the longest solo career?

It depends on how you measure it. The original Flash, Jay Garrick, has of course been around the longest: 1940–today. He’s got more than 65 years on his successors. But a more useful question is: How long was each Flash around before DC replaced him as “the” Flash?

The easiest measurement: years in publication.

Name Start End Span
Jay Garrick 1940 – 1951 11 years*
Barry Allen 1956 – 1986 30 years
Wally West 1986 – 2006 20 years
Bart Allen 2006 just starting

Barry is the clear winner by this measure, at three times Jay’s career, and 1½ times Wally’s.

But what about sheer number of comics**? Continue reading →

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Figured what the heck. I’m now on ComicSpace.

Because I need yet another site to suck up all my time.

It’s being described as MySpace for comics people—creators, fans, reviewers, etc.—though the feature set is pretty sparse right now. I’ve resisted MySpace itself partly because of a somewhat adversarial relationship with the site*, partly because I can’t stand looking at most MySpace pages, and partly because my friends are all on LiveJournal, so there’s really no compelling reason for me to go there.

And yet I’ve got profiles at LiveJournal, Slashdot, Opera, WordPress, Spread Firefox… Even eBay is adding blogging capabilities. Maybe I should bite the bullet and sign up for a Blogger account too. At least then I’ll be able to comment on Crimson Lightning.

*The culture at MySpace seems to encourage hotlinking images without asking. I’m still a writer at heart, so I consider the commentary to be as important as the images or more… and it really annoys me when people en masse just embed the images on their own site. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as the occasional “geniuses” on other forums who will hotlink an 800×600 or bigger photograph as their avatar, even though it only displays at 80×80. Damn kids, get off my lawn!