[Editor’s Note: I was also one of the first people interviewed by Brian Cronin at CBR in 2009 and 2011 for work on my House of the Muses series. Congrats, Brian!!! –Pam Harrison]
Hi, reader! Brian Cronin here, I’ve been writing about comic books for CBR for 20 years now, primarily through my “Comics Should Be Good” series of recurring features (like Comic Book Legends Revealed, Drawing Crazy Patterns, and When We First Met). I’ve written two books about comics for Penguin-Random House – Was Superman a Spy? And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed and Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? And Other Amazing Comic Book Trivia! and one book, 100 Things X-Men Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, from Triumph Books.
In this newsletter, I’ll share some of my knowledge of comic book history with you. This week, though, I’ll mix things up a bit by just celebrating reaching 20 years at CBR.com
It’s funny, I talk about 20 years at CBR.com, but it’s really been a lot longer than that if you take into consideration my time with CBR’s message boards. I first got involved in message boards in the early days of Prodigy when I was a teenager, but I mostly dropped it when I went to college (and obviously, Prodigy message boards were basically no longer a going concern by the end of the 20th Century).
In college, I poked around USENET a little bit, but it wasn’t until 2002 that I turned to the world of message boards. I was doing a Summer internship at my town’s City Hall, and they actively did not have enough work for me to do. I was there on a public service grant from my school, so they didn’t have to pay me, and since they weren’t responsible for paying me, they didn’t really care what I was doing when I wasn’t doing my various intern tasks, so I had a LOT of free time to just check out message boards.
Within a month of posting on CBR, they made me a moderator, and I’ve been one ever since (I’m an adminstrator now, as well). So I would interact with CBR’s original owner, Jonah Weiland, a decent amount, and occasionally I would do some stuff for the main site. For instance, the message boards had a chat room at the time, so I used it to organize some chats with comic book creators, and Jonah would then have me post a cleaned-up transcript of those chats on CBR’s front page.
In Deember 2004, I started the Comics Should Be Good blog with a few other posters from CBR’s forums, and we became pretty popular from the start. In June 2005, I started my Comic Book Legends Revealed column (initially Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed. When I did my first book in 2009, my editor said they felt it sounded a lot tighter without the “Urban” part, and I said, “Huh, you know what? You’re absolutely correct.” Also, selfishly, sometimes people would argue about whether a story would count as an “urban legend” but a “legend” is a lot vaguer of a term, and thus much harder to complain about, term-wise. Not that people haven’t tried. “That’s not a legend! That was mentioned in one letter column in 1983, so it’s just common knowledge!”), and that helped us a lot, reader-wise.
In 2006, blogs were very “hip,” and a number of websites were starting to add blog to their sites. Amusingly, I was part of ANOTHER group blog, Alex Segura’s The Great Curve, which Newsarama was looking to add to its site as THAT company’s blog, while Jonah contacted me about adding Comics Should Be Good to CBR. The amusing part of it was that I was told not to tell anyone about either move, and I didn’t, but, well, as you might imagine, both sites found that hard to believe (but I think they both realized it was true).
So, on May 25th, 2006, Comics Should Be Good became part of CBR, but as its own subdomain, goodcomics.comicbookresources.com (the original blog, which is still online, was goodcomics.blogpost.com). The name, by the way, “Comics Should Be Good,” was coined by Joe Rice, one of the original members of the blog.
At CBR, the guy who kept the blog running were Steve Sunu, Kiel Phegley, Andy Khouri, Andy Liegl, Rob Levein, Albert Ching, and, of course, the great Stephen Gerding, who designed the logo for the blog, and who I worked with at CBR for something like 17 awesome years together. In 2016, after Jonah sold CBR, the blog was just subsumed into CBR proper.
The main other writers at Comics Should Be Good with me were Greg Burgas, Greg Hatcher, Kelly Thompson, Chad Nevett, Gene Kendall, and Sonia Harris. When Comics Should Be Good was subsumed into the main site, both Gregs left to start their own website with some other writers, Atomic Junk Shop, which, I guess, must be coming up on its tenth anniversary very soon, which is quite cool! Check it out here. Sadly, Greg Hatcher passed away in 2021. Chad Nevett still posts at his blog, Graphicontent. Sonia Harris continues to be a kickass designer. You can check out her site here. Gene Kendall was the only other CSBG writer to stick with the site on CBR. He was here at CBR doing kickass stuff until last year. You can check out his author page here at Amazon to see the books he has written. Kelly Thompson, as you all know, is busy filling her bookshelves with the Eisner Awards she has won for her amazing comic book work (hopefully she’ll be adding a well-deserved Best Writer Eisner this Summer).
Here are the writers who posted on Comics Should Be Good during its time both before AND after CBR:
The aforementioned “main” writers, plus Melissa K., Mark Ginocchio, Alec Berry, Matt Derman, Kaitlin Tremblay, Bill Reed, MarkAndrew, Ken H., Connie C., Scott, Brad Curran, Danielle Leigh, Alex, Joe, Megan Parker, Michelle, Melinda, Paul Teel, Pol, Paul McEnery, Tadhg, Tom, Chad, Christopher, Harvey and Marionette.
Plus Comics Should Be Good hosted Sean and Brandon’s Comic Critics, Kelly and Sue’s 3 Chicks Review Comics podcast, Dean Trippe’s The Good Stuff, John Seavey’s Storytelling Engines, Kethylia’s Manga Mondays, Lorendiac’s Lists, The Line it is Drawn and Al and Paul’s House to Astonish (which is still out there. Check it out here).
Next time, I’ll be sure to share an interesting piece of comic book history to make up for spending this time telling a not-so-interesting piece of my own history.
Thanks for reading. If you like the work we do at CBR.com, please sign up for a free account for unlimited access all of our articles! You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and X. You can email me at brianc@cbr.com if you have ideas for future newsletters (or future I Written in the Book features on CBR itself), or if you just want to talk about comic books.
