I may not be “the comics guy” any more, but I still think in those terms from time to time.
One of my recurring fantasies is going back in time to 1995, buying the domain name comics.com, and filling it with comics. Simple ones at first, since the download speeds of the 1990s were pretty primitive…maybe a kids comic like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, a cat comic, a “cape” or superhero comic, and a car-themed comic, to get things started. “Kids, cats, capes, cars, comics!” I could move into more and more ambitious territory from there, once I’d established a reader base.
The domain wasn’t actually registered until 1998, well after people started to realize that this “internet” thing was taking off.
This scenario only works in the 1990s,* and even by the end of that decade you needed to do search engine optimization. But for a few years there, to gather a huge audience online, all you needed was the right domain name, modest intelligence, and the cussed stubbornness to keep putting stuff out on a regular basis. Those were the days. None of us appreciated them as much as we should have.
The nostalgic fantasy still appeals to me, because I love actually doing the work and really don’t like having to promote it.
But it’s time to do that beyond this simple Substack again, if all this work’s going to amount to anything. The Ubercross Abecedaria is nearly finished. The word needs to go out!
The first step, clearly, is to apply for a Guinness record, which I’m doing as you read this. But which Guinness record?
As I mentioned almost a year ago, there are three records for “largest crossword puzzle”: online, published, and unpublished. I could argue this puzzle is unpublished, since you can’t solve it directly on Ubercross.com: you’ve got to download it and work with its pieces. But that seems like hair-splitting—it’s available to anyone with access to the internet, a printer (or graphics program), and a whole lot of patience.
The Guinness World Records don’t always do a lot of hand-holding when it comes to the distinctions between their categories, so I have to figure some things out on my own. From its distinction between “online” and “published,” I assume “published” means “in print.” And I further assume that just going down to a FedEx Kinko’s (yeah, I know they’re just “FedEx” these days…) and cranking out one print of each section wouldn’t be sufficient to qualify for that.
I could start a crowdfunding effort to get this baby a modest print run. I’ve done such things before, for earlier Ubercrosses and other projects. Print does confer a certain legitimacy.
But as I bounced this off Janice, it became clear I was overcomplicating the issue. The puzzle is online; this record is right in front of me. I can always go for an in-print record later, but I’m setting an online record now (…or I will by the end of the year, close enough).
So here we go…
Wait. What’s this?
Tomorrow: Complications!
*(I actually did own the domain webcomics.com for a period in the Obama years, but that was a much later internet era and I wasn’t in the right headspace to make the most of it. I am proud to say that I didn’t just take the highest bid for it but insisted on the buyer presenting a publishing plan I approved of. Brad Guigar had such a plan and a demonstrated record of integrity, he still owns it today and has executed that plan. It’s in good hands.)