recently spent a dollar apiece to purchase several beat-up issues of Patsy and Hedy, one of Marvel Comics' titles from the 1950s slanted toward young female readers, just to get a fix on the art and the sensibility behind it. (Especially intriguing to me, since fashion plate Patsy Walker later went on improbably to become a superhero named Hellcat.) When I was done reading the book, it was falling apart and I knew I'd never read it again. I was left wishing there had been an easier, more economical way to get a sense of what the comic had been about. And now, I find, there is.
The site known as Nick Simon's Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index is, essentially, a gallery of thumbnails of front covers plucked from the output of Marvel Comics from January 1962 to January 1971, with some extensions both forward and backward in time. But the way the material is organized and cross-referenced, the loving care and attention lavished on it, as well as certain ancillary features, all make this site so much more than a collection of pretty, nostalgic pictures.
You can enter this vast cosmos of four-color heroism in any number of ways: by title, artist or theme, for starters. Then there's the fascinating prospect of viewing all titles issued in a given month, much as if you were a grubby-faced kid with a pocket full of quarters salivating in front of the newsstand during, oh, March 1965. The effect of this latter method transports the viewer fully into a vanished era. Intellectual context is provided by two on-staff reviewers, Pierre Comtois and Gregorio Montejo, who explicate selected issues at length.
A huge assortment of links will bring surfers further into online comics fandom. And Simon generously opens up his project to anyone willing to submit scans of artwork he's missing.
As the cover blurb on Fantastic Four number 14 asks, "How much action, how much drama do you crave?" If your answer is "Plenty, pilgrim!", then this is the place for you.
— Paul Di Filippo
Site of the Week—April 22, 2002
his is a site where half the fun is in just clicking on links until something hilarious pops up. AllSciFi has reviews of countless SF books, movies and TV episodes, all of them accompanied by a host of statistics on a particular subject's themes, storylines and characters. This makes it possible to search for films or novels that closely match a visitor's tastes. What's more, the contributing scholars—as they are called—at AllSciFi.com can review whatever they happen to be reading or seeing, so older SF works are covered just as often as new ones.
Discussions on TV and film are offered in the site's forums, too, and the boards for canceled shows like Voyager are as active as those for current programs like Andromeda or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are rants on whether Mulder and Scully ever learned anything useful about the big conspiracy on The X-Files, for example, and rhapsodies about the use of music in The Six Million Dollar Man. In short, this site goes almost anywhere a fan can imagine.
AllSciFi also offers a number of games, including a trivia quiz and a hypertext-based RPG where players become a monster rampaging through New York City. Some of the game and forum contents have a mildly adult sensibility and are less appropriate for younger visitors. Nevertheless, this site combines a great love of SF with a broad sense of humor—and tons of information on the genre's books and movies, whether famous or little-known.
— A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—April 15, 2002
his online version of the Hugo Award-winning fanzine is an interactive archive to Mimosa's best articles and artwork. The 'zine is devoted to serving as a history of SF fandom, and a scan through recent issues will reveal articles by Fred Lerner and Forrest Ackerman, as well as a don't-miss piece by Mike Resnick called "How I Single-Handedly Destroyed the Sex Book Field for Five Years and Never Even Got a Thank-You Note from the Legion of Decency."
The most recent issue of Mimosa available on this site came out in December 2001, and its theme is "Welcome to the Future." It has an account of the 2001 Worldcon in Philadelphia, ruminations on the effects of September's terrorist attacks on fandom and SF, an article about fannish time capsules (again by Resnick), and "Some Notes About 2001: A Space Opera," which discusses a musical based on—no surprise—the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Older issues on the site are similarly packed with fan lore and articles which will seduce any visitor.
It should be evident by now that articles are the heart of Mimosa, and the Web page makes a priority of indexing them by issue and author for easy searching. But the art on the pages of this fanzine cannot go without mention. It makes the stories vastly fun to read, dressing them up in humorous, well-drawn clothes. The cartooning styles carry delightful variety, the use of both the color and black-and-white formats is invariably terrific, and the commentary they add to each article gives extra zing to the accompanying prose. Mimosa is both fun to read and pretty to look at, in other words, and anyone interested in fannish culture or the history of the SF field should make visiting this page a priority.
— A.M. Dellamonica
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