Comics / Spotlight

The Art of Publishing a Comic Book Web Site

By Hervé St-Louis
August 1, 2009 - 13:21

Dear friends, this is one of those times in the life of a comic book Web site where changes occurs and focus happens. The Comic Book Bin has gone through many changes most of the times for the better. Yet no matter what happens, when I think I’ve got it all figured out, I’m still learning about the business of being a media outlet in the comic book and entertainment industry. I’ll share some insight in this column.

 
When I created The Comic Book Bin way back in August 2002, it was a site where I could list my back issues and sell them, instead of using eBay. eBay was time consuming and it wasn’t fun. It was easy to sell the popular stuff. Like an idiot I sold my entire Miracle Man Eclipse trade paperback collection, thinking they would one day be republished... Yeah I know.  I also sold the first ten issues of Spawn for a ridiculous price I will not tell. Someone is laughing somewhere and had the deal of the century. I just wanted to get rid of the stuff. It was piling up, and taking too much space. So my solution was a site called The Comic Book Bin – my own personal back issue store on the Web. Little did I know that instead of helping me get rid of my collection, The Comic Book Bin would be the reason I have more comic books, DVDs, video games and toys than I ever wanted.

To make the site interesting, I began commenting on the stuff I was selling. I added articles and soon, I added more articles than new back issues. It became a mini fan site. Ten months later, I recruited my first writer – Philip Schweier, who is still with The Bin today. That summer of 2003, I decided I would start reviewing comic books too. Amazingly many people were willing to just follow me and send me their reviews. Now, if you are one of those readers from 2002-2003, you’ll recall how ugly The Comic Book Bin was. It was hideous. Of those writers, Koppy McFad and Leroy Douresseaux are still part of the team, like Philip. I call them the first generation of Comic Book Bin writers. I was new at this. I would work hard, slowly shedding away the store component of the site and transforming it into a Webzine. Had people like Philip, Koppy and Leroy and all the others who were there never joined, the site would not have become a magazine about comic books.  The excellent reviews they wrote helped me focus too. Unlike Broken Frontier.com and Newsarama other online comic book magazines that started at around the same time, I had no plans and no clue into what I was doing. I did not set out to create a Web magazine on comic books. It just happened.

In the fall of 2003, I began requesting press releases from publishers and they happily obliged. Back then, I worked with Marshall Dillon who handled the press relations for Cross Gen Comics. He was diligent and one of the most professional and organized person I have met in the comic book industry. I worked with Viper Comics, Dark Horse Comics. DC and Marvel Comics were soon added to the list. In hindsight, I ask myself what they were thinking. The Bin was ugly and didn’t look professional at all. The only thing we had was our energy, and quality writing. Maybe that’s why they trusted us, and also the fact that standards were simpler and a non professional looking Web site did not face as much scrutiny as they do in 2009. Also, there were no easy templates and blogging programs allowing you to create your contents as easily as today.

One of my challenges for The Bin was that I was still manually creating the pages. Once we finally got a system to do that for us, it was about time. Writers could finally post their own articles, without relying on me. But the delay in me getting an automatic system was too long for many of our writers that gave up on my twice weekly updates.



Blogging is something that changed the game early on for The Bin too. Why would a writer sign up with us when they could write their own blog and make it “big.” Why wait after some guy to post your article online when you could do so with your own blog? We shed a lot of writers between 2004 and 2006, many because blogs became more attractive and offered a promise that people could build their own Web sites. It also offered the promise that they could do so easily without being Web developers.  We would also lose writers to bigger Web sites all the time. After gaining a good grounding at the Bin, many would set for more popular destinations, online or offline. The Bin was a good school for this.

Blogging, I would argue, unlike writing for a site like The Bin, does not foster professional skills by default. A lot of people say that The Bin is a blog. It is not. Although some of our content sometimes has a lighter feel. Much of it is backed by our infamous writing guide. Yeah, Writers of The Bin have to follow a 29 pages writing guide that explains how they must write to The Comic Book Bin’s standards. Anyone who’s read many of my comic book reviews can definitely see a pattern in the way I review contents. It’s the only way one can write for years effectively without being exhausted and uninspired. A format, a professional standard, gives the writer the freedom to focus on creative and argumentative matters instead of focusing on the form of their articles. I like to think that this is why the reviews at The Bin are some of the best in the business.

Bloggers often don’t like standards. They don’t like the man to tell them how to write. They like to be in total control of their content and form, even when they are making mistakes. For example, I’ve had several discussions with budding Bin reviewers that just didn’t want to include film credits in their reviews. For me, you do a disservice to your readers when you do not provide them with proper credits. You’re not doing your job. For them, it was unnecessary. My insistence on them providing credits, they said was dictatorship. This is often how bloggers feel about writing and professional standards. There is a culture of laissez-faire in the spirit of going with the flow and taking things easy. I don’t. When I post an article, I feel responsible 100% for what I or any of The Bin writers write. If there are factual errors they must be corrected. A well-known pet peeve of mine is people referring to DC Comics as “DC.” Another is people referring to Spider-Man as “Spidey.” Although you’ll find “DC” and “Spidey” in many articles at The Bin, be aware that I ask writers to correct these all the time. For me, it is a lack of standards. We are informing our readers, not chatting with our buddies. The average blogger will use comic book industry slang all the time. I do, but not at The Bin.

This is one of the criterion that separate the average blogger from good bloggers. Attention to details. The other ingredient which a lot of bloggers just don’t get is the amount of articles written. When I don’t write articles constantly, as I am this summer, it’s because I’m terribly busy with other tasks. Otherwise, I write and write and write. I’ve written as much as 14 articles in one day. It doesn’t scare me. I worry about the typos later. Many bloggers, who want to write successful blogs about comics, forget one golden rule. You have to write a lot. You can’t pause or take a sabbatical. That’s why sites like The Bin are probably best for the average blogger. You don’t have to write every day, yet you benefit from the thrust and effort of an entire team. Many bloggers don’t understand that. They think they’ll be the Perez Hilton of the comic book industry in just a few months. It doesn’t happen like that anymore.



There are thousands of blogs about comics around. And more and more, people think the solution to being heard is through their own little place on the Web and not as part of a bigger team. I personally  think that creating your personal blog in a crowded environment is setting yourself for failure. When I created The Bin in 2002, it was easier back then and I had help from many writers. Without their contribution, I wouldn’t be here today. I was a nobody in the comic book industry. Some would say I still am. Yet, when The Bin posts something, it matters. It’s not about my personal ego. It’s about the team work. In 2009, the effort it takes to create a Web site as popular as The Bin is exponentially greater than it was way back in 2002.

A lot of publishers and creators like to call us difficult when we won’t bend down and play the game the way Comic Book Resources and Newsarama do – giving them a free pass and not being critical of their products and actions in the industry. They always say “you’re the first one that asks me to improve this or that or be more professional in my communications and yaddy yadda – none of the bigger sites ask us for that.” I know. When I tell a publisher that sending me 20mb images in my mailbox is not very professional, they like to say I’m the one who’s not playing ball and that they never get such complaints from Comic Book Resources and Newsarama. Therefore I’m the trouble maker. I would say it’s a different perspective. The Comic Book Bin does not serve the interests of the industry, creators or publishers. We serve the interests of our readers. We are not here to promote company X that never buys advertising from us yet expect us to post all their press releases and do their dirty work just because they are publishers. This is one aspect of working at The Bin that has continually annoyed me for years. How many publishers and creators just assume that we are fanboys willing to just serve them and play along with their schemes? It’s impossible for them to think that someone want to cover the comic book industry professionally instead of as a rabid fanboy groupie. They can’t comprehend that their objectives are not ours.  My job is not to sell more comics books. I’m not here to do a favour to publisher X and creator Y. My job is to inform my readers, raise critical issues and seeks solutions to industry problems. My job is not to serve as the unpaid public relations mouth piece of the comic book industry.

There are a lot of other comic book Web sites that do a better job as uncritical promoters for people making comic books, video games, movies and toys. Just because, The Bin is supposedly a small site (yes, with 11,000 articles and up we are a very small Web site...). In terms of contents – relevant contents, The Bin has more of that than most of the so-called big sites. It’s also easier to find our articles too. We have better article management than most comic book Web sites. One can find any of our articles easily, even those published way back in 2002. The one thing that differentiates The Bin from the so-called big Web sites is notoriety and the message boards. We used to have message boards too. But it required active monitoring which cut in our ability to write articles. The big sites are big, because the same people go there every day and posts on the message boards several times per day.  Smart advertisers already know that people on message boards suffer from ad blindness. There’s little return from message boards. If a lack of a message boards means a site is small, then so be it.

Now, you may think of me as a frustrated publisher. Well, sometimes it’s hard and I have asked myself many times over the years if it wasn’t the time to just drop the ball. But there are good things about working at The Bin. First, the work I do has helped improve many skills. I’ve learned that I was a very good interviewer and that I could focus and write easily. I have learned that I can ask the right questions and change things for the better for my readers. I’ve learned that I always must be critical of my own actions. For example, when I was involved in the Doug Wright controversy, one of the players called me a boar in an email. Mark Waid once wrote things to me that will never be printed publicly for his sake. I have officially requested that Drawn & Quarterly never ever send press material to The Bin after they accused us of copyrights infringement for using an image of a book that was not used within a review. It’s so easy to just dish out and attack when I have a very powerful tool at my disposal.  But you know that old Spider-man rule about power and responsibility? “With great powers comes great responsibility.” It’s hard to enforce that one and as hard as it is for Spider-man, it’s as hard for me too! That’s why The Comic Book Bin has official rules of conduct.  That’s to make sure that I can be controlled.

People familiar with the site and some of our debates in many articles’ comments will know that I allow the editors of The Bin to censor me if I do not adhere to The Bin’s code of conduct. Yes, I own the thing yet, I willingly let my editors and even writers tell me when I’m out of line. That’s one of the best thing that I have learned from The Bin. To many publishers, I may be an annoying boar, yet I have standards and because I know I may not be a professional all the time, I give all the tools to the editors of The Bin to correct my errors when I make them. Working with this team has been important and great for me. We continually have writers leaving and new ones joining. Yet, every writer at The Bin is important to me and I’ve defied lawyers in the past to protect them. At the same time, I like to give them as much space as they require. Some have done important work, found a voice and communicated to the world messages that are not accepted usually. Yet, whether I agree with them or not, I felt that this was important. As long as they adhere to the rules of conduct and The Bin’s writing guide, that’s all I care. Their opinions are theirs and I will not censor them.



The Bin has also taught me about the public. The public, our readers are fickle. It’s hard to understand them. Most are quiet and never say a thing. But sometimes some are quite expressive about what they like or don’t like about The Bin. I’m always happy when I know I’ve helped a reader make a conscious decision on purchasing an action figure, or made them consider an angle on a movie that they had not thought of before. It’s always great to grow and learn from them, read their comments and try to help them. I take great pride in that and that’s why today, I’m sharing with The Bin’s readers some insight into who this guy who publishes this “small” Web site is.

In a week from now, The Comic Book Bin will be seven years old. Thank you very much for your continuing support.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12