It was official. The comic would be coming out. I wanted to have a place people could go and learn everything they wanted to know about my book, and as little as I knew about the web, I knew I should have a website.
First off, I had to decide if I should buy the domain “chriswisniaarts.com” or “chriswisnia.com.” What the hell I was thinking I don’t know, but I went with “chriswisniaarts.com.” (Although I do own “chriswisnia.com” now, so I can always change it, or use both.)
Actually, I’ll tell you what I was naively thinking. I had decided that any story I might tell in the foreseeable future could fit under my umbrella title of “Tabloia.” Because I was new and fresh in the industry, I assumed that my stories were good enough that people would buy them, and my career would just get better and better, and my sales would go up every issue as I built a readership who learned of me and respected what I was doing, and the “Tabloia” comic would go on as long as I felt like publishing it. So I wanted my website to be about the book. I thought my book would have a better chance at survival than myself, an unknown comics creator. I thought my work should be more interesting than the person who created it. I wanted the book to be the product, and not me. It also fit in with the whole fictional world I was creating of Tabloia as an actual non-fiction tabloid magazine.
Along these lines, I didn’t even plan to put my name on the cover of the book, let alone as the introductory phrase (“Chris Wisnia’s”) to every title. Another side note: To this day, people assume my last name is “Wisnias” as a result. When Stan Lee wrote a blurb for my Doris Danger treasury, he called me “Chris Wisnias.”
So that decided, we had to come up with a look for the website. In addition to it being an advertisement for my work, I wanted to have fun features there, so that people would want to check out the website, and hopefully spend some time there. I wanted things that seemed so fun and witty and entertaining that viewers would have an exact idea of what the book is like, and they’d hate themselves if they didn’t support us and buy my comic.
I discussed things with my helper and “business manager,” Wayne Jones, who basically executed whatever crazy hair-brained ideas I had in mind as I got them. We decided to stick with the black-white-and-red theme that Damon Thompson had chosen for the comic’s covers.
Of course, the most important thing was to show what the book was, and what was in it. I decided I wanted people to come to the site and have a nice big image of my current issue’s cover there on the index page. So we did that. And when you clicked enter, you came to a page listing the four stories in the comic: The Lump, Dick Hammer: Conservative Republican Private Investigator, Dr. DeBunko, and Doris Danger. When you clicked on one of the story’s images, it took you to that story’s main page, with a description of the story and a couple images from the current issue. This meant I was posting eight images of each issue (two for each of the four stories). That’s quite a bit to give away, I thought, but it just made the most sense.
Since this was still so early, we were still working out Wayne’s roll as “business manager.” We decided I would finance everything, and he would help me for free, just for the fun of the experience. So I wasn’t sure just how much, or what kind of help he wanted to do. I remember telling him to read through the issue and pick his favorite two panels for each story. And he said, Oh no. I’m not doing that. You have to pick them. You pick them, and I’ll post them. So I was learning that I should make the decisions, and it was probably better that way anyways, because I’ve realized about myself that I do have specific ideas in mind, even if I don’t realize it right off.
On Doris’s main page, I made sure to list all the contributing pin-up artists. I hoped this would cause people who looked up these artists to wind up on my page, and then realize they couldn’t live without the book, and then try to order it. To emphasize it, we soon decided to create a different “contributors” listing page. Here, I described all my favorite projects by all these great contributors, and made links to their websites.
We then did a page of “FAQs,” which was fun to make up important, not-so-important, and absurd “questions” people were allegedly asking. We made up a history of Tabloia, and we made up a history of Salt Peter Press. And all this just played into the attitude that we embodied in the comics themselves, with their letters pages full of fake letters, and fake “news” segments and editorials.
It was a natural progression to give every character in the book their own email, because we were pretending that each character is a real person and contributor to the magazine. So Dr. DeBunko and Doris Danger, as well as bit characters like Professor Pardi all are available to their public online. And of course, the most important one is Rob Oder, imaginary editor-in-chief of Tabloia Weekly Magazine.
We posted the site, and got a few hits, primarily from all my personal friends, who I called and asked to check it out. I occasionally saw a couple hits to the site from people who typed in one random word or another on Google or Yahoo. When the comic was listed in Previews, I saw a couple more hits to the site.
At this point, I was getting pretty excited, so every day, once in the morning and once at night (and sometimes more), I would check my emails to see if there were any potential fans out there. I got a fair amount of spam mail, and a few kind emails of support from friends. And every day I would also check the website stats to see how many people had popped over to my website, and for how many minutes they were there. And if people stayed on the site for more than two minutes (or even more than five! Wow!) then I would think, that’s great! That’s a potential fan! (And I would rarely think, “That’s probably another of my friends.”)
Looking at the very small number of hits per day, Wayne and I realized that the title page didn’t contain any text. It just had the cover image. So I discussed with Wayne how, perhaps it would make a difference if we put descriptions, book title, whatever we can get, on that title page, so that search engines would acknowledge it. And I mentioned that it’s too bad, because I would prefer to just have the cover image. That’s when Wayne suggested the “Secret Messages.”
What we decided is that, below the cover image, we would implant a black text on a black background, so that no one would be able to see it unless they happened to accidentally highlight it with their mouse. We would put the names of all the pin-up artists there, and we would also list random words that tend to generate interest and get hits from the general public. Names of celebrities, words people use to try to find porn sites, current events. And then, to make this “secret message” special, we would make all these random hit-generating words into an actual message to fans, and then tell fans in the book where the message is and how to access it, so that they could feel like they were special, and in on an in-joke that no one else knows.
So that taken care of, now our site was ready, with plenty of fun for people unaware of the book or curious, or who would read it and want to learn more. And sure enough we began slowly generating additional hits to our site.