And so it begins. Again.

Amazingly, a site about Comic Books is rebooting.

Superhero comics are the dominant genre in American comics, and if there’s one thing that American publishers know, it’s that their audience is aging and growing smaller. This, despite the fact that the Comic (superhero) Movie has turned into one of Hollywood’s Summer Tent-poles. More people than in many years are exposed to the American Superhero, yet the readership continues its decline.

One of the conundrums of a Very Long Readership Memory (VLRM) is that your core readers are generally intimitately familiar with the nuances of their favorite hero – YET, clamor for new stories, new classic stories, that build and expand on those histories. Anyone that has ever cracked a windshield (most definitely me) knows the more cracks you get the more entangled things get, and overall the system is weaker.

Weaker?  Yes, inversely to a root system, dependencies must be dragged along to every new story, which, while making it more enjoyable for the ‘Core’ reader, makes it easier for publishers to mess up (and harder to create) – and incidentally make it less likely that new people will jump on board. So what to do?

And so we come to the reboot.

The First Law of Comic Books is that fans will inevitably hate whatever you intend to do, and that hatred is directly proportional to the amount you attempt appease them ahead of time.

The reboot is a time-honored tradition (or cop-out, depending on your frame of reference) that allows for publishers to start-over, or start certain things over. The factors for this are legion: easier stories, public familiarity with out-dated comics, or even a desire on the publisher’s part to try things again (bigger, better, stronger, faster). The goal, I think, is always the same: better content, bigger audience. Sometimes it works – sometimes it doesn’t. That’s something we’re going to spend some time over the next few weeks talking about.

Back to our site.
In 2006, we started a news portal of our own. We covered PR, interviews, reviews and even wrote some articles.  Very tiring stuff, but we worked tirelessly and passionately at it. For three years we developed our voice and our audience. But we hadn’t thought things through initially, and it slowly overwhelmed us. The server was hacked, and our data corrupted (while erasing an ongoing behind-the-scenes redesign). It essentially killed us.

The other thing: design is really important to us, and when we started we looked much different than everyone else. A lot has changed and caught up. So we are taking 10 more steps forward. The homepage is the beginning. After August, the forums will take the next leap forward.

In the interim downtime, a LOT has changed in the industry and with digital in general. I, for one, miss MINX.

Starting back up again was something that we talked about doing, but our heart wasn’t in it. So we waited. And three months ago, we began the process of doing this over, and doing it right. Rebooting.

So here we are: refocused, redesigned, and it’s just the start. We are NOT a PR filtering machine, nor do we want to be. ComicBloc has always had a unique voice amongst internet communities, and that’s something we intend to bring to our homepage. A tighter focus on fewer articles published weekly. Each week will be bundled into an issue, and each issue part of a larger arc. Our arcs are themed by a larger topic, and everything you read (minus some surprises coming soon) in a given issue is supporting that arc.

We thought it appropriate given our timing and the marketplace (and the things DC was doing) to focus our first seven issues on Rebooting.

We hope you’ll join us every Wednesday and share your opinion on our forums.

Welcome. (Back)