About this Website

This sad and obsessive comic book library existed in one form or another between July 1997 and September 2011. Work on the website began during May 1998 and this last version (the eighth) was launched in June 2006.

This website was all about the comic books. I read them, I liked them, I catalogued them, spent uncounted weeks of my life typing in the 'details' of nearly 850 individual books. For 'details' read 'pointless trivia', such as who lettered Brooklyn Dreams (Bob Lappan did). There was no literary criticism here, even though it was once intended.

Version 1 (12th July 1997 to 2nd May 1998, a total of 295 days) was a real life index card system. The data cards were arranged alphabetically by title and contained the statistics of each comic book. The box was plastic and black.

Version 2 (3rd May 1998 to 6th May 1998, a total of 4 whole days) saw the move from index cards to HTML. The overall look was totally black, with white text, and a long list of comic books. The data pages were nothing more than plain text files and there were no images whatsoever. As I had yet to actually learn HTML, this was simply a Bill Hicks website, edited in Notepad to add my own content.

Version 3 (7th May 1998 to 12th December 1998, a total of 220 days) was still dark and gloomy, with the long list of comic books on one main page, but now the data pages were composed in HTML and I scanned in all of the covers. 3.1 was the first website proper and 3.2 was a short-lived attempt at brevity. From this I learnt graphics manipulation, image maps and HTML in general.

Version 4 (13th December 1998 to 30th April 1999, a total of 139 days) had bright, textured backgrounds, and bluey, gooey buttons. Navigational image maps from 4.1 were replaced with tables in 4.2, which meant the removal of huge, fuzzy JPEGs and the introduction of tiny, crisp GIFs. Then 4.3 got a reorganised directory structure, HTML and image files separated. JavaScript was also learnt, used to control the text in the status bar of a browser.

Version 5 Version 5 (1st May 1999 to 16th April 2001, a whopping total of 717 days) was made as a reaction to the fact that 4.3 was far too image intensive to be used online. Up until this point, I'd been using the website on my own computer exclusively, so download speed hadn't been an issue. As of 24th April 1999, it was. Data pages were minimalised, including only the cover and logo as images. JavaScript was fixed for Netscape Navigator and I started using frames. The www.megasad.co.uk domain name was registered and in 5.2 the transition to a screen resolution of 1024x768 was made. In April 2001 I took it offline, along with all my other websites.
Version 6 Version 6 (18th August 2001 to 3rd April 2002, a total of 229 days) was the resurrection of my online presence. The library opened in a pop-up window for some of the time and the number of menu items, hence core sections, was reduced from 21 to 5. Full implementation of Cascading Style Sheets and "JavaScript Includes" was invested in, so that future versions would require only minor re-coding in order to completely change in appearance.
Version 7 Version 7 (4th April 2002 to 24th June 2006, a gargantuan total of 1543 days) saw the purchase of megasad.com, the move from JavaScript to Server Side Includes and the introduction of honking huge text throughout the site. The colour scheme went from green to blue, and perilously deep nested tables for structure were removed thanks to far more pervasive use of CSS. I also began re-scanning all of the comic book covers, that there would be larger versions to view upon clicking the small cover image on each comic book's data page. A search engine and guestbook, superior to the ones used in version 5, were also implemented.

Finally, Version 8 (25th June 2006 to 5th September 2011, 1898 days) was laid out almost entirely using CSS, with only a vestigial table skeleton to hang off. Additionally, everything was defined in terms of relative units, the upshot of which being that the entire site was scalable; make the text bigger in your browser, and not only would the text change size, but so would the images and spacing between them. Maintained on MacBook, a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, running Mac OS X 10.6.3 through 10.7.1, BBEdit was used to write the XHTML, CSS, SSI and JaveScript files, images were made with Acorn and everything was uploaded using Transmit.

I used five other computers to build this place over the years:

  1. A 66MHz Intel 486 DX2 with 8MB of RAM and a 270MB hard drive. It ran Windows 95, Notepad and Paint Shop Pro 3 & 4, was used to put together versions 2 through 3.1.
  2. A 300MHz Intel Pentium II with 128MB of RAM and a 6.4GB hard drive. It ran Windows 98, Notepad and Paint Shop Pro 5 & 6, was used to make versions 3.2 through 6.
  3. iBook Swan, a 600MHz G3 with 384MB of RAM and a 15GB hard drive. It ran Mac OS X 10.1 through 10.2.8, BBEdit and Adobe Photoshop 6 & 7, was used to maintain version 6 and to create version 7.
  4. eMac Spunk, a 1.25GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It ran Mac OS X 10.3.3 through 10.4.6, BBEdit and Adobe Photoshop CS & CS2, was used to maintain version 7.
  5. MacBook Blue, a 2GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. It ran Mac OS X 10.4.6 through 10.6.3, BBEdit and Adobe Photoshop CS3, was used to craft version 8.

The old guest book was courtesy of nms, the search engine was from PerlfectSolutions and I found the external link script at 456 Berea Street. The artwork used in the navigation bar was taken from Popbot Reader and was by Adam Warren.

This website was comprised of 1125 XHTML documents, 26 Server Side Includes, 1 Perl script, 3 JavaScripts, 3 Cascading Style Sheets, 4 GIF images and 1746 JPEG images. It contained the details of 847 individual comic books, trade paperbacks and original graphic novels, spanning 195 different titles.