Requiem for a Website

This week I learned of the passing of Mike Voiles, creator and caretaker of “Mike’s Amazing World of Comics,” an accurately named online resource that catalogs the output of the major American comic book publishers from 1933(!) to today. Along with The Grand Comics Database but frankly much more fun to browse, Mike’s site has for a couple of decades now been one of the truly indispensable comic reference sites on the web. Included in my “Links” list since Day One, I’ve often used it as an information source for posts on this blog and as a vehicle for the occasional virtual trip down memory lane.

Easily my favorite resource on Mike’s page is “The Newsstand,” a feature that lets you search by month and year to view a gallery of comic book covers you’d have seen on the newsstands at that moment in time. As a former kid who excitedly biked to the drugstore each week to see what new wonders had been placed on the spinner rack, and as a current aging fan who still sometimes dreams of stumbling into a time-lost store where those pulp-paper treasure are still on sale for pocket change, I can’t express how much fun I’ve had virtually window-shopping at the site. Frankly on some level it’s been reassuring to know I’m not the only weirdo who attaches such fond memories to disposable, four-color entertainment, and to sense the presence of other comic geeks like me who have stopped by the “rack” already, and those who will follow after me (and this time, without the risk that they’ll bend any comic spines while rifling through the racks).

There’s a lot more to the site, though. Mike makes it possible to search through individual DC character histories and track down their appearances in various titles, or seek out the work of specific writers and artists. There’s a guide to the history of the DC universe and a discussion of how (or whether) fictional characters age, plus image galleries of DC “house ads,” gag strips and PSA’s and of course the Hostess snack ads that featured superheros, Archie, Casper, etc lusting after Twinkies, Ho-Ho’s and Fruit Pies. There are guides to crossover events, giant-size comics and promotional comics and even listings of comic book reprints of newspaper strips.

It’s easy to take fan-run websites for granted without stopping to consider the amount of time and effort put into them, but Mike’s passing has made me stop to consider — not for the first time — the ephemeral, transient nature of our pastimes, and of ourselves. As Pogo would say, websites, like life, “ain’t nohow permanent.” Over the years I’ve frequented many favorite sites that now exist only as ghostly echoes on The Wayback Machine. In the mid to late 90s I devoted a ridiculous amount of time and energy to overseeing a James Bond fansite that’s now a mere memory to a few fans, and later maintained a Superman blog that is likewise now serving an eternal sentence in the Phantom Zone. The most common cause of death for a site is likely the exhaustion of its creator’s free time or enthusiasm or both, but others may have vanished because the cost of hosting got to be too onerous, or because it’s easier to just set up a Facebook page to serve the same purpose. A few, no doubt, met their ends when their caretakers passed away. Whenever I think of those old haunts, there’s always that unsettling feeling you get when a place is mysteriously abandoned. You see that last, business-as-usual posting that makes no hint of impending change, but bears a date stamp that’s far in the past. And then, nothing. It’s like one of those ghost ships where the crew’s personal effects are found still neatly arranged with uneaten dinners set out on the mess table, but there’s not a soul left aboard. I always wonder, “what happened here? I hope they’re okay…” In Mike’s case, we know he’s passed on because an announcement was added to the root URL, along with assurances that before departing he made arrangements to keep the site alive in other hands, which was a pretty awesome gesture, really.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, really, but maybe it’s not a coincidence that just yesterday, my daughter Grace shared with me a cool quote from Homer’s Illiad:

The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

– Homer

So if there is a point, maybe that’s it: things like web pages and comic books, indeed all our hobbies and life in general are ultimately impermanent and fleeting, but that’s what gives them whatever worth they might have. Whatever it is that pleases you to pour your heart into is by definition important, no matter how trivial others may deem it, and even if the things you create don’t stick around any longer than you do, they still have value if they’ve made you happy. But for the record, I’m grateful Mike’s site will be sticking around for a few more trips to that spinner rack in 1973, and ’75, and ’82…