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If you've been to the comic's homepage lately, you'll have noticed that I updated the front page t be a landing page instead of the latest one. This is because a lot of people expressed some aww at the idea of seeing spoilers when visiting the comic for the first time.

Personally, I don't really believe in spoilers, and my very cursory research on the subject has implied to me that spoilers used to be reserved for things like the ending of Planet of the Apes or The Sixth Sense (you know, movies whose premise hinges on their twists). But then freaking Harry Potter came along and publishers got to adopt this asinine marketing scheme where they built up hype around the magic of the first time, blind read of a thing and it made people en masse overly sensitive to any kind of information about a thing, which makes marketing for those of us who don't already have a well known multi million franchise more difficult because how do you tell people about your comic without telling them about your comic? D8<


That was a weird tangent. In any case, the landing page is now available and the images change depending on which character you're hovering over. It is neat!


Addendum. Now that I'm thinking about it, the cultural myths surrounding so called spoilers are remarkably similar to the cultural myths surrounding sex and now I'm interested in this phenomenon at a sociological level

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Some Ed

Spoilers were definitely a thing with books long before Harry Potter. I recall someone complaining to me about giving spoilers on The Lord of the Rings books when I said {spoiler}at one point in the story they get to Rivendell{/spoiler}. I don't recall exactly when in high school it was, so I can only say it was sometime in the late 1980s. I don't particularly call that a real spoiler. I mean, is it a spoiler to say a book featuring J.R.R. Tolkien's hobbits features The Shire? A book with Bilbo in it features Bag End? It's also possibly worth pointing out that I gave my spoiler more than 30 years after the part in the story had been written. (I'm not giving an exact number of years so as to not give away which book may happen contain such juicy details. Also, I won't say if such a place happens to have also been put into any movie that may or may not have been made about the books.) I also don't particularly understand why some people are concerned about knowing the wrong details about their franchises too soon. Then again, it's possible I might be twice born, so the whole thing of getting to experience something in the right order was already ruined for this lifetime from the start. Or maybe not; I have on rare occasion experienced that strange feeling of vujà dé - you know, where you feel like you're experiencing something that hasn't happened to you before. Edit: To be clear on my position regarding my "spoiler" above: If you read no J.R.R. Tolkien books before TLotR, and somehow managed to avoid hearing that Rivendell is a place that is encountered in that book, Rivendell probably means nothing to you. If you read The Hobbit before TLotR and you know that The Hobbit came first and TLotR was written pretty much entirely due to its success, you pretty much know that Rivendell will be in there somewhere before you open the first book of the trilogy. If you just read The Silmarllion before TLotR, ... wow, that's some dedication there. I doubt the spoiler will matter to you. If you just read The Guide to Middle-Earth, ... that's basically made entirely of spoilers and know already. If you didn't read anything and did your best to avoid paying attention in class as much as possible in the sixth grade when The Hobbit was assigned, and now you're in high school lit and TLotR has been assigned... you're looking for any excuse you can get to not read it, and I just provided one to you, so you'll capitalize on it as much as you can. Which is I think where my classmate was coming from, so he actually *liked* that I gave said spoiler, despite his complaints. But the point was, he knew the term.

BMBrice

Oh I never meant to imply that HP invented spoilers. They just weren't culturally as big a deal before unless you were dealing with something like the sixth sense or the ending of planet of the apes. People certainly weren't going to bite your head off for saying something like "the characters go to X city." Now it's like a cardinal sin and a lot of it is the marketing element. HP specifically probably isn't the cause, and just happened to be the first major global success entity to bank on it enough to propagate it everywhere

Applestone

The landing page doesn't work. Both images are aligned vertically instead of horizontally, they don't change when I hover over them and they both lead to the latest page. I'm using Firefox.

BMBrice

Yeah I'm trying to iron out specifics for various browsers. It MIGHT fix itself for ya if you hard refresh it, though- ctrl+F5