The Daily Burn is dead, long live Superheroes, etc.

You know how - with ASM and FF, among others - Marvel decided to continue with the original numbering, apparently because they figured that 10 years from now even all the relaunches since the 90's wouldn't confuse new readers enough? That's how I feel right now.

As you may know, I originally blogged on a site called the Daily Burn. I abandoned that blog in late 2005 for Superheroes, etc. But, I kept the blog up and even some of the links you'll find on my sidebar linked to it.

I have just finished copying and pasting the most relevant posts from the Burn into Superheroes, etc., back-dating them so they appear in the archive rather than crowding the recent posts (they all have their original dates and times), and finally deleting The Daily Burn for good. I'm pretty sure I've updated all the links in the sidebar to reflect this, but if you notice anything out of whack, let me know. I apologize to anyone who gets ticked off by this, but I couldn't figure out a way to transfer the comments from the Burn into the posts here.

In part, I did this to get organized. Unfortunately, the idea arose because of something a bit more unnerving.

Since happily accepting ADD's invitation to make Superheroes, etc. a satellite site for Comic Book Galaxy, I've had a significant increase in hits (by the way, thanks both to ADD for the invitation and to all the readers who have been kind enough to stop by Superheroes, etc.). I was checking the hits yesterday and noticed a surprisingly large number of them were coming from the Daily Burn.

The reason, I soon realized, was a bit of a satirical piece I posted some time ago. The original concept of the Daily Burn was that it would be a comic book version of The Onion. I posted mock news articles for laughs. I quickly abandoned that idea, preferring straight commentary. But before the gears shifted, I wrote a mock article titled "STUDY CONFIRMS: NINJAS SUCK." It was poking fun at both the relegation of what have always been nigh-unbeatable warriors into mere cannon fodder in superhero comics; and the fact that so many TV shows, movies, comics, etc., portrayed ninjas as heroes when - as far as I know - in real life they were paid assassins.

Even though the Burn was completely dormant, this parody continued to draw steady attention, particularly from message boards dedicated to arguing over whether Ninjas were better than Pirates (something the second issue of Street Angel had fun with). I don't know where the whole Ninjas vs. Pirates thing came from, but it was funny and harmless, and I thought it was cool these N v. P guys were putting links to the article in their sigs.

Unfortunately, in the last few days something a bit more disturbing happened. There were hits to the Daily Burn coming from a martial arts dojo's message board, and in particular someone responded to the article saying that I would be killed in my sleep. There were a few other angry, non-threatening posts. At first, I took it as a joke. I still think it was a joke. But this is the Internet, and one of the downfalls of the net is that you can't hear the voice behind the words, and unless they say "I'm kidding," or put one of those winky-smiley things in their post, you never really know, do you? And I know there are people who are into martial arts (I certainly hope it's the minority) who get very stupid about it and might actually try to make good on their threats. At my first college I worked at the campus radio station, and we had to kick out a DJ who pulled a fucking samurai sword on another DJ because he hadn't met him and thought he was trying to break into the place. That's the kind of guy I worry about.

So basically, I wanted to distance myself from the Burn as much as possible, and this was something I had been considering anyway.

Peruse the archives if you'd like. They now go back to July 2004. I brought over all the reviews and all the relevant commentary. The only stuff I didn't bring over were posts like "I haven't posted in a while because I'm busy" and "Hey, this site over here is updated!" Oh, and obviously the Ninja article and all the other mock articles are gone.