Webcomics Nation

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

~ the obituary ~

webcomics nation is the second-pass joey manley project that i would not have heard of in the mid '00s. i was in engineering school in ankara in '05, the english webcomic culture was not a thing i was watching from a turkish browser, the bandwidth budget on a ttnet line went to academic pdfs and napster's russian descendants rather than to drawn strips updating four days a week. for some reason that was the trade. the modern tales family of platforms was already a thing in the english indie scene, webcomics nation was the third or fourth project off of it.

the platform launched on 29 july 2005 as the open-tier turnkey-host version of what manley had been doing with modern tales since '02. the model was a free ad-supported account plus a paid tier at seven dollars a month for cartoonists who wanted custom domains and bigger archives (cant remember if the price ever moved). the comparison wikipedia uses is blogger for blogs and flickr for photos, the same kind of platform shape that took the install burden off the creator and ran the templates as a service.

webcomics nation was the most profitable property in manley's catalog by the late '00s. that revenue was what kept the broader modern tales family running while the curated subscription-network parts of it kept losing money. back then. in 2007 manley started merging the platform into josh roberts' comicspace, which wikipedia records as "one of the more technically difficult projects" and which took longer than anticipated. the merge never really finished. the platform closed in april 2013 and manley died of pancreatic cancer in november of that year at age 47.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

this part is the kind of thing a software engineer would actually recognize on inspection. webcomics nation ran a server-side templating system that let the creator upload strip files and have the archive pages and the rss feed generate automatically off them. that workflow was a clear upgrade from the keenspace and comic genesis flow that required the creator to ftp the file in and edit the html template by hand. the difference looks small on paper but the friction on a daily-updating strip was real, and webcomics nation took that friction away in exchange for the seven a month.

to be honest, the platform sat in the cluster of joey manley properties that included modern tales as the curated subscription network and graphic smash as the action-comics imprint, with serializer running as the literary tier on the side. webcomics nation was the open tier that did not require manley to invite the creator or to curate the strip, anyone could sign up and get an account and the platform took the ad cut on the free tier or the subscription on the paid tier (close enough). the financial logic was that the open tier paid for the curated tiers.

~ the merger that did not converge ~

the comicspace merger announcement in '07 was the moment that defined the platform's last six years. josh roberts had built comicspace as a webcomic-focused social network, a kind of myspace for cartoonists with profile pages and friend-of lists and embedded comic archives. the merge plan was to fold webcomics nation's hosting backend into comicspace's social frontend and to launch the combined product as a single platform.

back then, the technical integration ran into the usual problems, the data models did not line up, the templating engines had different assumptions, the migration from one user table to the other had edge cases that kept surfacing. for some reason that work stretched across several years. wikipedia notes the merger took "longer than anticipated" and never fully completed, which is the polite version of what happens when a small team takes on a stack rebuild that the original budget did not size for.

~ the day it died ~

the practical end came in april '13 when the platform stopped accepting new strip uploads and the front page redirected. the cartoonists who were still posting in '13 had mostly moved or were about to move, the smackjeeves and tumblr eras had already happened and the surviving webcomic-host tier was a smaller business than the '07 merger had been priced against. the closure was not a public-event collapse, it was a quiet wind-down of a platform whose readership had been migrating for years (or whatever it was called).

the domain is now occupied by a malware site, per the wikipedia note on it. the archives are not centrally preserved, individual strips that ran on the platform have mostly migrated their archives to other hosts or to their own domains, but the platform's centralized strip directory is gone. joey manley's broader catalog (modern tales, graphic smash, serializer, webcomics nation) collapsed across the '11-to-'13 window and his death in november '13 closed the chapter on the curated-webcomic-network era he had been running since 2002.

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