Cool Beans World

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

~ the goodbye ~

The entire front page was a single Flash object, nine hundred and fifty-five pixels wide by five hundred tall. In the page source the developer had given it the id scroller, and the surrounding markup checks whether you have the plug-in and sends you somewhere else if you do not. This was 2001. A page that size, moving, was a decision about who the site was for before a word of it had been read.

Cool Beans Productions was an animation and design studio in Sheffield, and Cool Beans World was its attempt to make a business out of comics that moved. Not video, not a cartoon: comic pages with animated panels and timed lettering over a soundtrack, sold by subscription behind a login box that opened in a four-hundred-pixel pop-up window. The launch in 2001 came after a heavy print advertising campaign, and in October 2001 Internet Magazine named it site of the month.

The talent they got is the part that still surprises. Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill brought Marshal Law. Simon Bisley and John Bolton drew for it. Clive Barker's The Yattering and Jack was adapted there. These were not people looking for exposure in 2001, and a Sheffield studio with a website had somehow put them all on the same masthead a decade before anybody had worked out how digital comics were supposed to pay.

I was on a modem in Turkey in 2001 and the arithmetic on this one is not complicated. A front page built as a half-megabyte Flash movie, with a login behind it and a subscription priced in pounds behind that. Even for someone who knew the site existed, and I did not, the first screen was the last screen. A price is a barrier you can decide about. A page that will not finish loading is not a decision, it is just a page that never arrives.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who they got to draw it ~

The published list runs to Dark Frankenstein, Marshal Law, Scarlet Traces, Kingdom of the Wicked, The Yattering and Jack, Someplace Strange and Bone'Ed, plus computer-generated short films built around Marshal Law and a piece called Saintly. For a site that lasted about a year that is a lot of commissioning, and it tells you where the money went: into content, up front, before anyone knew whether people would pay to read comics in a browser.

They were early by roughly a decade in the way that costs money rather than the way that makes it. Broadband was not general in Britain in 2001 and the payment plumbing for small recurring web subscriptions barely worked. The reading device that eventually made digital comics viable was seven years from existing. Everything Cool Beans World assumed about its audience turned out to be true later, for somebody else.

~ the copyright line ~

The archive shows the ending happening in stages, and the stages are more honest than the date. On 23 January 2002 the front page is still the full site, the Flash object with the login pop-up wired to it and three and a half kilobytes of scaffolding around both. By 27 March 2002 the same address serves under a kilobyte: the words CoolBeansWorld.com, and beneath them a copyright symbol and the studio's name. Nothing else. No notice, no explanation, no date.

Cool Beans Productions went into administrative receivership in May 2002, so by the time the company formally failed the site had already been a copyright line for two months. The domain was worth something to somebody after that. By March 2003 it was framing a link directory called Top Finds, and today it serves a script that bounces you to a parking lander. Twenty-four years of somebody else's advertising sitting on top of a comics site that lasted twelve months.

~ the one that got out ~

Scarlet Traces went up on Cool Beans World as a partially animated serial by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, a sequel to The War of the Worlds set in a Britain that won and industrialized the Martian technology. The site died with only a fraction of it published, which left the pair holding a finished script and a pile of art built for a medium that had just stopped existing.

D'Israeli redrew it as a conventional comic. Edginton licensed it to Rebellion, which ran it in Judge Dredd Megazine volume four, issues sixteen through eighteen, in 2002. Dark Horse published it as a four-issue series in 2003 and collected it in hardcover that August, and the story has kept going in print for more than twenty years since. It is the only thing to come off that site that anybody can still buy, and it survived by giving up the exact feature the site was built to sell, which was the animation.

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