ComicsAlliance

» see comicsalliance.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

comicsalliance was the kind of specialty blog i knew existed as a category but never read regularly. by 2007 i was a computer engineering grad in ankara, monthly comics were not part of my media stack, and the english-language comics conversation was something i saw only when it spilled onto general tech blogs or into the tumblr feeds i was passing through around 2010.

comicsalliance launched in 2007 inside aol's network of editorial blogs, alongside the aol music properties spinnermedia.com used to run. the founding editors were john anderson and chris dooley. in 2009 laura hudson took over as editor in chief and pushed the site's coverage into places most other comics blogs were not going. representation in the big two, and the labor side of who got hired at marvel and dc.

hudson left in 2012 for a broader freelance career at wired and other outlets. joe hughes came in as the new editor. the site had built a distinct audience by that point, one that read comics coverage more like cultural criticism than as press release rewrites. in fairness, comicsalliance also carried chris sims's long-running "ask chris" column and kate leth's "kate or die" strip.

~ the case file ~

~ what it covered ~

the site occupied the corner of comics blogging that was willing to look at the business behind the panels. sexism in the industry, editorial politics at the big publishers, how a title got greenlit or killed. it did not review only, it argued. by the early 2010s that argument had turned into an eisner-shaped case in its favor.

the 2015 eisner for best comics periodical/journalism went to comicsalliance under joe hughes and staff. still. the eisners are the industry's own awards, so getting one for the journalism category as an online site rather than a print publication was a signal that comics criticism had migrated to the web for good.

~ the two owners ~

aol went through several restructurings in the early 2010s as it tried to figure out what its portfolio of editorial brands was actually for. on april 26 2013 aol abruptly shut down comicsalliance along with the aol music sites. the closure lasted about five weeks. townsquare media bought the site and a few of the music blogs on june 2 2013 and brought most of the editorial team back into the same seats.

the townsquare era ran for another four years. the site kept publishing at roughly the same pace with the same voice, and picked up the 2015 eisner in that stretch. townsquare's business was radio stations and small-market ads, and comicsalliance was an odd fit for that portfolio from the start. it was tolerated more than invested in.

~ the long tail ~

on march 31 2017 townsquare placed comicsalliance on hiatus and dissolved the editorial staff. the announcement went out that afternoon. the site was not deleted, the archive stayed live on comicsalliance.com, but the publishing stopped that day. no farewell issue, no retrospective, just the byline count going to zero.

the alumni network is where the site lives now. the writers who came up through comicsalliance ended up at polygon and the ny mag entertainment desks and half a dozen other places. the criticism style the site had built kept publishing under other flags, the way it usually does. the eisner sits on someone's shelf as a receipt that a blog inside aol's ghost network won the print industry's own journalism prize before its owner remembered to notice.

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