It’s been a crazy week, fully of 3:00 am programming sessions, server restarts, tech calls, web sites in need of updates, and a dozen other things that go into preparing for the final holiday sales push at this little software company that’s been my home for the past 15 years. As if that weren’t enough, today was update day, which means I not only needed to push out the update for this week’s new comic indexing, but also handle as many as possible of of the content corrections and updates that have been flowing in all week.
My own desk is piled with work and half-finished projects, but with everyone else in the office busily working on their own deadlines, I started tackling the queue that had grown by some seven hundred new submissions in just three days. “Man!” I thought. “Why do I do this job? I could have gone into writing medical software, but nooooooo…“. I was ready to bang my head against the desk out of sheer exasperation.
But then, in between editing the appearance notes, cover colorists, and countless other entries sent in by dozens of people from around the world in the past few days, I had one of those quintessential ComicBase moments where I was simultaneously stressed out by the workload, ferociously proud of what our little company has built over the past decade and a half, and utterly humbled by the amount of effort, care, and goodwill that causes relative strangers from half a world away to deluge us covers for a hundred issues of Martin Mystere, or hold raging forum battles over the proper way to denote character names in anthology storylines.
Like I said, sometimes I don’t know why I do this job. And I don’t know why so many other people are willing work so hard to help us. But man, am I glad you do!
I’m a big believer in work, and I respect the heck out of anyone, in any job, that gives it their all. On a personal level, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve managed to with ComicBase and Atomic Avenue—projects that started with me wanting to find a way to catalog and sell my own comics, then got well and truly out of hand.
But as proud as I am of all that our little company has managed to do over the years, I still have to stand back occasionally and simply marvel at the sheer volume of effort that’s been donated by people I may never even meet, much less have the chance to buy a round of drinks for at San Diego. From helping moderate the discussion boards to correcting the spelling of “Sienkiewicz”, to driving the editors here collectively mad with your insistence that we start crediting cover inkers and colorists, you folks are the one who made ComicBase and Atomic Avenue what they are today. This isn’t some kind of false modesty on my part, it’s simply the truth.
Thank you. For everything.
-Pete