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SEQUENTIAL CULTURE #24 21 Apr 04 |
Why Sequart.com? |
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JULIAN DARIUS |
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I’ve been writing about comics since the early
days of the internet revolution in the mid-1990s. I had read comics forever, and the internet provided an
opportunity to make public my examinations of the best graphic novels and my
appreciation for underrated titles.
These were the days in which online comics information was scant; it
was a different world. As my personal
website went through various incarnations, so too did my writing on
comics. A version of the Continuity
Pages -- annotated catalogues of comics organized by continuity instead of
title and number -- did not take long to develop. They went through several incarnations before finding a home on
PersianCaesar.com, my first website with its own domain. The comics section of that site, including
The Continuity Pages and a few articles, quickly became the site’s main
attraction. While my other writing
garnered an ever-increasing number of visitors, I simply knew how to promote
online comics material better. In
2002, my friend Matt Martin sent me review samples with the desire to write
for my site or its messageboard. I
didn’t know what to do with them, since the site was explicitly my own and
was not meant to accommodate others’ writing. I thought the two of us would make a good
base for a new site, taking as its bulk my pre-existing online writing on
comics. Matt would handle reviews and
I would write a column called Sequential Culture that would examine
with serious intent some fairly important issues in comics. This was the genesis of
ContinuityPages.com. That site did very well. I continued to write for it, adding to The
Continuity Pages and writing new annotations and the like. Visits consistently climbed. Bryan Miller joined the team in 2003 as a
second reviewer, I launched a news feature, and Jeff Chon joined in 2004 to write
detailed exegesis of graphic novels.
In addition to The Continuity Pages, we had columns, reviews, news,
articles, annotations, chronologies, and interviews. |
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ContinuityPages.com no longer made sense: the website’s title seemed to be saying
“The Continuity Pages and Some Other Stuff” and this was not the identity the
site was taking. |
And therein laid the problem. The Continuity Pages were still the
largest section, but even its size would inevitably be eclipsed as the other
sections grew. ContinuityPages.com no
longer made sense: the website’s
title seemed to be saying “The Continuity Pages and Some Other Stuff” and
this was not the identity the site was taking. Some readers expressed confusion. We had become an umbrella comics site with a more sophisticated
edge, and our statistics showed that we were entering the big leagues of
online comics sites. We had outgrown
our moniker. And so we are here at the launch of
Sequart.com. I won’t even go into the
countless hours of recoding that this move required. The title comes from “The Sequart
Manifesto,” in which I argued that the medium of comics needs a new
name: not composed in clunky fashion
of other words, without the negative connotations of most existing names, nor
connoting a particular form our medium takes. “Sequart” was derived from Will Eisner’s “sequential art” but
morphed into an autonomous and punchy term for a medium that could be taken
on its own terms. I’d created the
term years before in my own unpublished writing. As a title for a website, it was short and no more confusing
than many others out there. |
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We do this out of love.
If you think we’re not dedicated, take a look around this site and
think about how all of this is the product of a total of four people. |
We don’t make money yet -- although we’d
like to be able to pay people in the future.
We do this out of love. If you
think we’re not dedicated, take a look around this site and think about how
all of this is the product of a total of four people. It’s been nearly ten years, over 300
unique pages, and more hours of work -- and more visitors -- than we can
count. With its new, umbrella identity, I invite
you to contribute to Sequart.com. You
can submit articles, annotations, and interviews through the “Submit” area of
out “About” section, available through our menu new bar. If you have published, online or in print,
articles or interviews for which you hold the copyright, I encourage you to
consider submitting these too to the site. The other way that you can contribute is
through spreading the word. Mention
us on messageboards all over the internet:
if you frequent them, drop a line about us. Tell your friends at the comic shop. If you have a website, add a link to us. Order a T-shirt: it starts conversations about comics. Donate if you can. And
drop us a line to tell us how we’re doing:
if you like a columnist, tell him so.
You can do all this through our “About” section. Let’s make Sequart.com a success -- a site
by comics-lovers for comics-lovers, run by a small number of friends for a
large number of fellow lovers of our under-appreciated medium. |
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And thanks. We can’t do
anything without you. Thanks, a
million times, thanks. |
And thanks. We can’t do anything without you. Thanks, a million times, thanks. NEXT TIME The next Sequential Culture will examine
Vertigo and will appear on Friday, 7 May, with additional columns appearing
every second week thereafter. |
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Read every Sequential Culture on
Sequart.com! Read about the author on our About page. Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com. Discuss this column online on Sequart.com’s messageboards. |
Read “The
Sequart Manifesto”. |
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WEBMASTERS: |
To link to Sequential Culture itself, link to http://www.sequart.com/SequentialCulture.htm
-- it will always feature the newest issue. To link to this particular column, link to http://www.sequart.com/SequentialCulture24.htm. |
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PUBLISHERS: |
Please cite quotations by website and author (e.g. “—Julian
Darius, Sequart.com”). |