SmackJeeves and Other Rambling... (Patreon)

Okay, so I was caught COMPLETELY off guard by this (so off guard that it’s really screwed with my comic re-posting process) but SmackJeeves, my old hosting site for around a decade, finally shut down on January 1st. While I’m sure it’s mostly MY fault that I didn’t hear about this before it happened, that really is par for the course with how SmackJeeves had been run over the final few years. There IS a reason I’ve spent the past year porting all my stuff over to that fancy new website I’m actually paying real money for, after all. But still, SmackJeeves was a pretty major part of my cartooning exploits for a looong time. I probably oughta say at least a few words about it now that it’s gone, right? I’ve talked about it a lot in passing, or as part of a general news update, or whatever, but I don’t think I’ve ever just sat down in Old Man Storytime Mode and really talked about my time on SmackJeeves.

The funny thing is, I don’t really know how much I CAN say about SmackJeeves that would be worth reading. I mean, I wasn’t there when the site started up, so I can’t provide any tales about the site’s early days or how it exploded into the hub of webcomic activity or anything else that’d make a great story for people looking to learn what SmackJeeves actually was. And make no mistake, there ARE stories to tell there. I mean, how ‘bout that name, for starters? “Smack Jeeves”? What even the heck? There’s an ever-growing number of people out there who don’t even remember Ask .com, let alone the fact that it started out as AskJeeves .com and had a butler dude named “Jeeves” as the mascot. For reasons probably best lost to time, somebody thought it’d be funny to have an abusive alternative to the more polite website name, and the website that found whacking around a butler to be the height of hilarity turned out to be a webcomic host. Don’t look at me, I wasn’t there.

Actually, I don’t even remember when I first heard that SmackJeeves was a thing. Back when I was first putting Far Out There together, I know it wasn’t one of the websites I was considering as a host. At the time, that choice was between DrunkDuck and ComicGenesis, a decision that ultimately came down to DrunkDuck approving me faster. As I’m sure you’ve picked up on, I’ve never been a tremendously avid webcomic reader. Part of the reason I draw my own is because there’s so few already out there that I’d read. All that’s to say that I didn’t come to know SmackJeeves because I was a fan of any comic already hosted there. To be honest, I actually remember hearing the name “SmackJeeves” spoken with some derision back in the day, having a reputation as the home of especially cringy fanfic fodder. And yeah, I do remember a disproportionately large number of Pokemon fan-comics on the front page most of the time. But then, as with most webcomiker opinions, I found it hard to take all that seriously when I didn’t even like the stuff those people were drawing themselves.  Besides, even a lot of those people started using SmackJeeves as a mirror for their comics when DrunkDuck started going through their various ownership/hosting woes.

That’s certainly when I started looking at SmackJeeves seriously. DrunkDuck had a lot of server problems, and on several occasions lost large chunks of updates during botched updates. Like a lot of people, I started up my SmackJeeves account just as a backup for the DrunkDuck ones, in case the “main site” was down again. Of course, the more the old site struggled and fumbled through its troubles, the more I came to view SmackJeeves as the new “main site” and DrunkDuck as the back up. And then, when DrunkDuck instituted a site-wide redesign to force all the sites into a single uniform layout, that’s when I decided I was done posting every page twice and officially moved to SmackJeeves full time. Oh, the irony, right?

I really, really wish I could compare SmackJeeves and DrunkDuck to each other on a more useful manner, and it’s entirely on me that I don’t have more to say. For the window of time I was on DrunkDuck, I was fairly plugged in to the community they fostered. They were really good at running forum-based games and community events to keep people interacting with each other. Most of the comics I actually did read at the time was stuff I’d either seen recommended there or was drawn by somebody I knew from the forums. I’m sure if I’d tried, I would have had the same experience at SmackJeeves. The people who DID frequent those forums seemed to regard them as a perfectly wonderful little community to be a part of. However, even back then, I was already starting to retreat into the anti-social hermit cave that’s all but consumed my life these days, and never really bothered to engage with the SmackJeeves forums. Maybe I’d heard too many stories about SmackJeeves being a haven for terrible slashfic writers who hadn’t discovered tumblr yet? Honestly, I think it’s more that I’d gotten too focused on using advertising on other websites and at conventions to bother trying to spread word of mouth on a forum, and advertising was the only reason I would have interacted with other people in general. Yeah, that’s a sad thing to admit, I know.

One thing that I DO remember being pretty nice was what happened when I tried to move Conventional Wisdom over from DrunkDuck. I’d been able to claim the “Conventional Wisdom” name just fine on the first site, but there was already a comic by the name on SmackJeeves… sort of. Actually, it was one of the many, many, MANY comics that somebody had started up, posted four or five pages, then given up after a month or two. That other Conventional Wisdom hadn’t updated in years, and that’s despite the fact that it hadn’t started until AFTER mine was already online. Since I didn’t want to have to come up with some weird variation like “ConventionalWisdomComic” or “CWcomic” (because HOW LAME WOULD THAT BE AMIRIGHT?) I e-mailed the site admin and asked if I could take over the dead comic’s address. I was all prepared to have to defend my claim to the name over a lengthy series of messages and was bracing myself for disappointment, but NOPE! The admin was immediately all “Oh yeah, you’ll definitely make better use of the address than this dead thing” and re-set the address for me to use right away. So that definitely got SmackJeeves on my good side.

Speaking of which, I have to mention how, for most of my time there, SmackJeeves was run by a single dude. I think there were a few forum moderators, but all the actual website nuts and bolts were handled by a single omnipotent Admin… and I feel bad that I can’t even recall the dude’s name right now. That tells you how detached I was from this community despite theoretically being a part of it for most of a decade, huh? And yes, the fact that one single person was trying to run this fairly massive website all alone as a labor of love explains a LOT about what eventually happened, but at the time it seemed pretty cool. After all, most of the problems DrunkDuck had struggled with came from a series of ill-conceived team-ups and buy-outs by larger companies that didn’t seem to know what to do with the site. Being left up to a single owner with an actual interest in the site rather than some clueless, faceless corporation had to be a better position to be in, right? Again, the irony is astounding in retrospect.

Since I WAS so detached from SmackJeeves’ behind the scenes workings, I can’t say for sure when things started to go downhill. I do remember the site having several troublesome updates, which was VERY frustrating to deal with given why I’d moved in the first place. Then again, if I’m remembering correctly, a lot of these technical hiccups happened around the time I was living in DC, so I was getting frustrated by absolutely everything at that point. I also know that the troublesome updates were then followed by a long stretch where NOTHING got updated, and I think that’s around the time that things really soured behind the scenes. At some point, right around the time that Project Wonderful shut down, there was a lot of talk about SmackJeeves being involved with a new web advertising startup to take its place. That never wound up happening, and in retrospect the very fact that it was attempted suggests that the site’s owner was really desperate for a new source of income.

Which, of course, explains why he’d eventually sell the whole thing to a Korean company a year or so later. These are, of course, the people who run comico .io, and who would eventually shut the whole thing down, but at the time it seemed like a good thing. After several years of the whole “one guy running everything” not yielding many results, it seems like a lot of folks were excited to have a full team of professionals in charge of maintaining the site. And to be fair, they DID do a lot to improve the comic management interface right after the purchase. What’s more, there was a stretch of six or eight months where SOMEBODY was really active on the SmackJeeves Twitter account, retweeting just about every New Page Update anybody announced and generally doing a decent job of signal boosting everybody’s stuff. And then… it just stopped.

Again, I didn’t spend enough time listening to what was going on behind the scenes, but after about a year of being under new management, said new management apparently just stopped talking to anybody. In retrospect, is seems obvious that they’d decided SmackJeeves wasn’t performing as they’d hoped under it’s old form and were making plans to convert it over to the format of their homegrown website. Maybe if regular SmackJeeves users hadn’t already spent years getting used to the site ownership not being around that much or doing a whole lot they MIGHT have started moving on sooner than they did, but that’s not what happened. Instead, I get the impression that a lot of people were caught as off guard as I was when they suddenly got an alert that the whole site was changing form in a week or two.

Obviously, that’s when I resolved to move on to my own hosting, and a lot of other people moved out other sites. I couldn’t even begin to speculate on just what all was happening on SmackJeeves during that final year. Apparently they region-locked the whole site to just North America at some point and I never even heard about it? I’m not sure if that says more about how distracted I’ve been with the whole New Site thing or just how little of a crap I gave about SmackJeeves at the end.

And, of course, there’s the fact that the whole thing totally shut down without me knowing about it. As I mentioned up top, this caught me SO by surprise that it’s kind of screwed me over a bit with the comic re-posting. Obviously, I’ve still got all the old comics saved on my computer, but I DON’T have the original commentary text saved anyplace. I’d just been working my way through the old SmackJeeves pages and copy/pasting it off the original posts. Well, that suddenly became a LOT harder to do. There’s the Wayback Machine, obviously, and it looks like a decent chunk of Far Out There has been captured there in one form or another, but Conventional Wisdom doesn’t seem to have been anywhere near as lucky. I’m pretty sure most of the original commentary for late-2016 through mid-2019 Conventional Wisdom is gone forever now. Yes, I know it’s ultimately my fault for taking so dang long to do these re-posts (never mind failing to obsessively back up every single jot of information associated with my comics) but it’s still one last lovely gift from SmackJeeves as it heads out the door. Thanks for all the help, guys!

Oh, and you know what’s the BEST part? After all of this time, the DrunkDuck site- sorry, I mean “TheDuckWebcomics” –that site is still up! From all signs, it seems to have weathered its ownership woes and soldiered on just fine! I’m pretty sure they still require all comics to use the same general page template, but it’s up and regularly updating and people are still using it! Don’t get me wrong, it’s still high time I finally set up a stand-alone site of my own, so I don’t regret moving, but still… Actually, once I finally DO get all the new sites fully set up and regularly updating, I’m strongly considering going back to The Duck and starting to re-post comics THERE. Like, queue up a month’s worth of old comics to go live daily on that site as I work on brand new comics for MY site. Maybe it’d be a way to divert some traffic from over there? I dunno, but if nothing else it feels like a nice reward for managing to outlast SmackJeeves.