Quarterly Report

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quarterly report

It’s been a quiet quarter here at Mars Will Send No More, with a few posts about retrofuturistic trading cards, some new poems, and a brief vignette. If you need more comic-book blogging in your life, I’m happy to report our old friends at Longbox Graveyard, after a long hiatus, just started a new series running every Monday. Since it’s always 1977 at the Longbox Graveyard, Paul will be covering a different comic book from 1977 every week. It’s fun, it’s free, and it’s like unearthing a glorious time capsule.

Just when I thought no one was paying attention anymore to my vast archive of comic book posts here, MyComicShop sent a message saying I had accumulated a nice credit in my account thanks to their affiliate program. No, I don’t make a dime off this blog—I lose money to keep it running—but I do earn a little “store credit” when readers click through links to MyComicShop to purchase comic-book goodness. Thanks to readers in the last six months, I earned enough credit to get a box of X-Men and Fantastic Four books I was forced to sell off five years ago.  I was very sad to see them go in 2013, but we had a joyous reunion last weekend, and for that I am grateful to you. Thank you for reading and clicking!

As for why it’s been so quiet lately, most of my writing energy this year has focused on a story that’s been four years in the making. You might have noticed my ill-advised obsession with writing the utterly non-commercial fiction series The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches since 2014. The first 16 stories, totaling over 200,000 words, have been leading up to Mags’ birthday party in 2029. Now it’s time to throw that party—and have it all go horribly wrong.

More than once, I considered giving up. The self-induced pressure to take four years of notes and craft them into a narrative that would deliver a real payoff after all the build-up—honestly, I’ve had many days where I didn’t feel up to the challenge. Strangely, getting in touch with that feeling helped me work out several scenes where the odds against survival are so overwhelming that even the indomitable Mags thinks she might surrender to death at her enemies’ hands.

But what I love about Mags, and why I find it so fulfilling to write about the black-hearted smuggler’s adventures, is her unconquerable spirit. She’s stronger than I will ever be, yet she inspires me to be stronger than I am. I’ve often wondered if readers relate to her on a similar level. But last year, I sent a few of her stories to a friend who endures an extremely painful medical procedure every eight weeks. My friend recently told me she takes those stories with her every single time she goes in for the procedure, and she reads them, and they help her get through the experience.

Before it’s all said and done, Mags will probably conquer her fictitious solar system, but helping a real-life friend remains her greatest achievement. Mags is all about kicking ass no matter what life throws at her. If my irreverent space pirate’s strength can help someone cope with their own challenges, then her true mission is accomplished.

2018 has been a difficult year so far, but I hope you stick with Mars Will Send No More, and that you, too, keep kicking ass. Thank you for dropping by and reading, commenting, filling in gaps in my research on comic books and dinosaur collectibles, and enjoying my archives of artistic obsessions. I’m glad you’re here to share them with me.

 

P.S. Please listen to more Snail. Listen often, and play at unreasonable volume.

 

 

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quarterly report

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joe shenton, meteor mags, quarterly report, talk like a pirate

Quarterly Report: AD 2017, September.

Part 1: Talk Like a Pirate Day.

My late father had a weird hobby in the 1980s. He spent his evenings in an isolated room, talking on a radio to people from all over the world. He was an amateur ham radio operator, and he picked up all kinds of shortwave stations from the Soviet Union and different places. He was in on the very first developments in packet radio, which was a forerunner of packets of information transmitted over the Internet today.

I never got into ham radio, no matter how many antennae I helped Dad install on the roof to wreak havoc with the neighbors’ television reception and phone lines. But later, I got into public radio at WCBN-FM and KAOS-FM in the 1990s.

Climbing on the roof with Dad was fun as an adolescent, but I have even more adventurous memories of my public-radio days, none of which I can share with you out of a sense of common decency and legal liability. My memoirs from the pirate station in Arcata, California in the early 2000s are even less printable, and that’s one of the everlasting joys of my life.

These days, you don’t need a radio transmitter to talk to people all over the world; you just need the Internet. I loved public and pirate radio, but no one in Europe or Australia or Japan or South America talked to you while you did it. 1990s college radio was local. The Internet is global.

My favorite Internet-based communications group is one I affectionately call my story hour group. They have read stories in live, voice transmission from across the country and globe for more than a decade now. Many of those stories inspired my own poems and fiction.

I got a microphone recently, which only seems amazing to readers who have followed me since 2013 when I sold everything I owned. A few of you understand how lean that year was, and how lucky I am to even be alive to post utterly irresponsible blogs in the middle of the night to you right now. Thank you if you bought some comic books and art that year! I wouldn’t be here without you.

Anyway, to celebrate “Talk Like a Pirate Day” on Tuesday, September 19, I read Hang My Body on the Pier for a group that connects via the Internet to read stories to each other, and it was fun. Reading out loud for a solid hour is more challenging than you’d think, and I was thankful my new mic had a mute switch for when I needed to clear my throat, cough, or gulp another beer.

Okay. I might have gulped beer a few times in their poor little ears. But that is only fitting for “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, and may they all suffer the wrath of a thousand hells if they squandered a single ration of rum that night. Sink and burn me.

I enjoy reading my stories aloud, so I recorded my two most recent short stories and submitted them to Audible to release as audio books. They are currently in the quality review process, because Audible has specific requirements about decibel levels for peaks and room noise. We will see if I got them right the first time, or if I need to try again.

Part 2: Kickstart My Heart.

Don’t tell UK-based artist Joe Shenton, but I backed his recent Kickstarter with ulterior motives. His artwork is the kind of thing I wish I could do. Since discovering his work on Reddit, I could not get this thought out of my head: “He is the guy who should be illustrating my science-fiction series, not me.”

I could spend the rest of my life trying to draw space stuff and aquatic animals the way he does, and not even get close. His drawing arrived last Saturday and is now framed on my wall. He asked about themes or subjects his contributors like, and I told him, “I like space, pirates, and octopuses.” He sent me this glorious 6×8 ink drawing.

Just between you and me and the world-wide web, I’m pondering how to make it worth his while to draw telepathic space octopuses, calico cats, cybernetic electric eels, armored space lizards, and psychedelic rock-and-roll visions from the year 2029.

quarterly report

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quarterly report

As you know, these quarterly reports are serious business, so for the love of all that’s holy, put on some decent socks.

In the past six months, your purchases at MyComicShop through the affiliate links on this site earned your humble martian moderator enough store credit to get two volumes of the Samurai Executioner Omnibus. THANK YOU, dear reader! These are books by the Lone Wolf & Cub creative team, full of poetic decapitations and deeply disturbing human behavior in Edo-period Japan.

I love omnibuses so much that I made my own this month. There will be an announcement about it here tomorrow. For now, here’s a shot of my first proof copy of the paperback edition. It’s 183,000 words, 588 pages, and weighs more than 2 pounds. It’s like heavy, man.

Hey! Wasn’t I supposed to graduate this month? Yes. But the forces of evil conspired against me, and the upside is that I have until November to turn in my final project. My sister wanted to send me a little graduation gift, which turned out to be a “sorry about the forces of evil” gift. It’s a plant that looks like an alien growing out of a Dimetrodon‘s back. Hell yeah!

It’s a lovely addition to the blogging station, especially because my venus flytrap bit the dust after I made the n00b mistake of letting its stalks grow. And yes, that’s a bloody stuffed puma in the photo, and I got him a friend this year. They read Villains of All Nations together.

Most people would think it odd that a grown-ass man takes a stuffed puma on visits to the dentist, but my dentist totally understands. He is my hero. He works on big cats like ocelots and tigers at the Phoenix Zoo, and he and his father saved the life of a jaguar that was illegally trapped in Mexico. The poor thing had tried to chew through the metal bars of its cage, damaging its teeth so badly that it couldn’t even eat. My dentist fixed up that awesome cat, and he and his staff take excellent care of me.

No, I don’t have him give pretend check-ups to my toy puma. But now that you mention it, I might ask for that next time! It would make a great photo.

Last but not least, my cell-phone pics of my old Godzilla toy got their fifteen minutes of fame this year. Some cable show about memorabilia found them and contacted me for permission to use them on an episode. No, I can’t remember the name of the show right now – This Bloody American Junkyard or something – but I signed a contract allowing them to unleash my late-night toy photos on the world. If a huge green monster destroys your city this year, I guess you know where to send the hate mail.

This is a different Godzilla toy who deserves his own gallery here someday.

 

 

7

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quarterly report

Today is my forty-fourth birthday, which means Mars Will Send No More must be starting its seventh year. Since its rashly considered inception in January, 2011, it has grown from a secret geek obsession with comic books into something far greater: a tool for spreading the comic book obsession like a virus throughout the entire solar system!

Yes, those are bold words from a site that can only brag about having 1.3 percent of the lifetime page views racked up by this video that will never give you up.

But you know what? College (and some high school) classes now send their students to this site. Seriously. Several of the classic EC Comics stories I pirated from a zillion sources (some of whom hate me) and dragged into the light on this site have become educational material for online classes which link from their course modules to individual posts here.

LOL! Let’s hope they don’t read the rest of the site, because I’m pretty sure most of it violates the university’s code of student conduct! For the love of all that’s holy, pray the innocent youth don’t see naked cat women, drug-fueled psychedelia, anarchist ravings, and deranged comic books printed with the blood of innocents in their ink!

Then again, that sounds a lot like any issue of EC Comics, so read on!

death on the web

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broken links, comic book blogs, dead links, internet, quarterly report

Many human endeavors can be understood as an urge to conquer death by creating something that will live on after we’re gone, and blogging is no exception. We put things up and hope they will last. But despite the internet’s ubiquity and massive storage capacity, it has an ephemeral, ever-changing quality. Things die on the web.

I thought about that last week while subjecting this blog to a couple tools to check for dead links. What sort of things had died here on Mars? Many were links to (and pingbacks from) pages I have taken down due to the evolving nature of my artistic concerns. Some were links to other sites whose owners no longer have them hosted, or pages they took down. Some were links to products and product searches at retailers which, for some reason, were no longer generating valid results. And at least one was just a dumb typo I made in a URL!

It took the better part of a morning to scrub 3000 pages here and repair or delete between 100 and 300 dead links. Hopefully the efforts will keep this site fresh and vibrant for search-engine indexing, and reward people discovering it for the first time with links that actually go somewhere, rather than into the dreaded 404 Error dead zone. I sacrificed a few pages that were so problematic it seemed easier to burn them clean instead of re-doing them. They weren’t getting hits anyway, and the dead links were probably part of their problem.

Mars has always been my little garden of inspirations, and I hope clearing out the dead wood will help it remain a thriving one. Do you have a favorite tool for checking broken links? Drop a line in the comments section here and let me know!

memo from mars

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quarterly report

“I don’t get blogging.” Someone said that to me recently. What’s there to get? If you ever kept a diary, you get it. Or a dream journal. Or notes while you travel. Or maybe you just pretended to be Captain Kirk and kept an imaginary Captain’s Log.

Stardate: 29 June, 2016.

Halfway through the sixth year on Mars Will Send No More, this blog has outlasted the original five-year voyage of the bloody starship. Thank you, dear reader, for indulging my unhinged rantings about comic books, rough drafts of poems before they get a tune-up, and the never-ending struggle to create an illustration that’s worth a damn.

Strange things happen when you keep a journal. Whether it’s a private diary for your eyes only, or an exploration of something that interests you, you learn. You grow. You change. And you gain a greater perspective on events when you can step back and see where you’ve been.

This blog is a record of things that inspired me—mostly comic books, but also art and music and pop culture artifacts. A few thousand people drop by every day to plunder the archives. They’ve racked up 3.1 million page views since 2011, but they’re a pretty quiet bunch and always leave the archives in order when they leave.

If you’re new to this site and you love comic books even half as much as I do, start with my Top Ten Favorite Single Issues and its follow up Ten More Top Ten Favorites. These lists are also instructive for people who don’t “get” why anyone would be into what many people perceive to be children’s cartoons. You might also be interested in Indie Comics, which includes spotlights on small press comics the creators were kind enough to send for review.

And if you think I’m ending this post without a link to my glorious archive of dinosaur comics, you’re crazy!

five years of life on mars

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Mars Will Send No More, quarterly report

Now that we’ve got robots landing on and exploring Mars, and comets, and asteroids, and we’ve got close-up pictures of Pluto’s terrain, all those golden-age pulp comic books seem kind of silly, don’t they? The other planets are no longer mysterious climates inhabited by monsters, mutants, mermaids, and laser pistols. Even the running joke about this blog being sent from Mars makes increasingly less sense as time goes on.

But it’s been a cool five years, so let’s do another! Many of the things that began as little seeds of creative spark here on Mars Will Send No More have taken on a life of their own. It’s fun to watch them grow. I recall how crushingly difficult it was to come up with 1000-word vignettes for a collaborative writing project here just three or four years ago when Paul and I did The T-Rex Beatdown. Now I’m planning the follow-up to the 118,000-word hail of bullets known as Red Metal at Dawn. Life’s funny like that!

The world has changed, too. Just a few Januaries ago, we kicked off a New Year by posting pages from the long out-of-print Miracleman #15 with a call to the comics industry to quit arguing about the series rights and just reprint the bloody thing for us! Well, they finally did. Thanks, Marvel! Sometimes, the world does become a better place.

Something changed for the better at MyComicShop, too, the retailer we often link to in our vintage comic book posts. About every three months, sometimes every six, we get a message saying we’ve earned a small amount of store credit for directing comic buyers to MyComicShop. In the second year of MWSNM, we once earned over $100 in store credit, but it’s usually more like $20 now. Not huge, but a nice bonus. Last time, we got the recent 4-issue Alien Legion: Uncivil War series, which we missed when it came out. Thank you, readers! Anyway, now we affiliates can apply that store credit to the shipping charge of $4.95. Yes, we used to have pay $5 for those quarterly bonus shipments of store-credit comics, but no longer. Yay!

Despite the changes this blog has been through, WordPress says about 200 people visit it on an average day, which is standard for maybe three years now. Sometimes, a post gets picked up and we see a traffic spike above the typical 2000 daily page views. In December last year, we saw a day with 4000 page views.  Those traffic spikes generally show a burst of referrals from Facebook, though a few other sites refer to us routinely, and we often get picked up by articles that want to link to a specific comic book story in our archives. The most page views we ever got in a single day was 10,034 on February 9 last year, and we almost hit 800,000 total views for the year, from nearly 90,000 visitors.

We still love hearing from independent artists and publishers who want to share their work. Our indie comics reviews remain sporadic due to the writing-intensive nature of our university courses, but they are one of our joys here on Mars.

Thank you for dropping by!

quarterly report from beyond the visible stars

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ellie, quarterly report

Once upon a time, you could find a fresh post about comic books nearly every single day here at Mars Will Send No More. That rigorous publishing schedule has declined in recent months, and we expected that to correspond with a decrease in the stats we bloggers love to obsess over so very much. This assumption turned out to be completely wrong.

Even after periods of hardly posting at all for one to three weeks at a time, the Martian archives still hold many undiscovered treasures for legions of internet users around the world. Whether it’s orginal content like last week’s Guide to Getting Started Selling Comic Books on eBay or the scans we found, cleaned up, and organized from the KISS Marvel Comics Super Special two years ago, certain posts seem to take on a life of their own.

On the art and poetry side of the mix here on Mars, we’ve already covered how our art sales are doing within the last week. Other minor successes related to this blog include earning, at last, both Top Seller and Power Seller status on eBay in June. The dark cloud of selling off our beloved comic book collection at least has that silver lining, and our success as sellers has earned us a few commissions from friends to sell some of their stuff online, too. It isn’t like we make a single dime from doing this blog, but the experience of pursuing our passionate obsession with comic books and comic book art has certainly opened some doors for us in other areas of life.

We like to chart our activity over time, so let’s have a chart already!

June 2014 exceeded 85,000 page views by more than 10,000 visitors. This topped May, which had already set a new high by breaking 80,000. June also saw a new high where daily page views broke 8,000 for the first time. All of that put us well over the top of 1,500,000 lifetime page views, a number we now absolutely love quoting to potential customers in our professional sphere.
LOL let’s just hope they don’t actually READ this lunacy!

And now, Ellie the Studio Cat. Long live the resistance.

Give me that quarterly report, baby!

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ellie, quarterly report

We do these quarterly reports just for fun, like everything else on this site. Mars Will Send No More has certainly grown beyond our humble expectations, and we have learned a lot by doing it for nearly three and a half years now. On practical matters such as coding bullet lists in HTML, effectively tagging posts to capture search traffic, and the power of a WordPress blog to drive social media marketing, MWSNM has given us as much of a learning experience as any of the things we’ve been studying at the university concurrently.

Despite the growth in size and traffic of MWSNM, we didn’t expect what happened in April. In April we posted nothing, but traffic stayed about the same. Monthly page views site-wide began hovering around the 50,000 mark about six months ago. Did that number fall in April? No. That suggests the massive collection here of over 1500 posts has achieved a life of its own. It has grown from a little plant that needed daily attention and care to a healthy young tree we can forget about watering for a month. Nice!

Now, it has not been an entirely joyous occasion selling off our sizeable collection of physical comic books since last fall. We have, however, taken great pleasure in knowing our favorite comic books of all time will be in the hands of readers who appreciate them. After all, books were meant to be read, just like guitars were meant to be played, and cats were meant to sleep in Priority Mail boxes.

quarterly report from the martian underground

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airplane, ellie, quarterly report

Even after 12 quarters, we still receive inquiries into the nature of the cryptic phrase ‘mars will send no more.’ A page dedicated to our secret origin illuminates all.

But in another sense, Mars is our virtual garden. Or maybe a plant in our garden, grown from a digital seed. We tend it, trim it, prune it, feed it, groom it, give it love, and even worry that someday Mike Baron is going to show up and make us take down the whole thing, since he invented the phrase. It’s scary, sometimes: having a little digital pet that someone could just turn off at any time.

Blogging is like writing a book you can never touch. Paper burns, but what do pixels do? Where is the page when you turn off your machine? When we were kids, we read books about magic. When we became adults, we lived in an electric world made of it.

And you know what? We love it. Why do 7000 people drop by every month to look at 7 or 8 pages in the Martian Archives? We don’t know. We do get a kick out of being referred to by such notable sources as The Atlantic, who referenced our scans of America’s most famous comic book: The safety instructions found on every airplane! Interestingly, they don’t reference the exact post. Instead, they use a URL for our tag archives for the word airplane: https://marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/tag/airplane/

What if we posted something new tagged with airplane? It wouldn’t matter what the post was really about, as long as it had a tag for airplane. We could post propaganda for the Martian Underground Resistance, in hopes that the Atlantic’s readers will someday join the revolution. Or, we could just leave them a greeting card with a cute cat and a cozy scarf on it.

LONG LIVE THE MARTIAN RESISTANCE!

MOUNTAIN LIONS FOREVER!

Perfect! The Master Will Be Well Pleased!

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art, collage, comic book collage, quarterly report

Ultra Cosmic Bonus Points are yours if you identify the source comic book for the panel in the center which clearly states this collage is “Perfect! The Master Will be Well Pleased!”

 

 
Martians, normally we would do a quarterly report. But, we’ve been on a sort of vacation and stumbled upon a top secret scientific formula for destroying time itself. The upshot of this discovery is a wildly creative state of existence in which colors magically wash canvas almost by themselves, and old dreams find new life in other forms. The downside is complete impatience for things like quarterly reports!

We should mention how pleased we were that Rick Veitch noticed we posted some of his early Sgt. Rock backups and linked to them from his site. Rock on! We just mailed a spare copy of Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends #3 to someone special, hoping to spread the dream art madness.

Anyway, the last 48 hours or so we have been working on a painting using some new techniques. It started out as a collage of panels from some beat-to-hell copies of early Marvel Team-Up. As a mental break, we took the scraps and some Mod Podge and applied them to a little canvas that would fit on our scanner. It took us exactly as long as the 31-minute album by the Melvins, originally entitled Lysol before they were threatened with a lawsuit. If you’ve never glued old comic books to something while listening to the Melvins at top volume, you really should put it on your to-do list this weekend.

Quarterly Report from the Martian Frontier

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quarterly report

Greetings, Martians! Let’s do a quick quarterly report.

In the next couple of weeks we’ll be looking at classic monster stories from Jack Kirby. Drop by and check them out at your leisure! We just wrapped up a retrospective on DC’s Strange Sports Stories from the 1960s. Thank you for the comments and reminiscing.

Blah, Blah, Stats: This month our meter rang up page view 500,000. Half a freakin’ million! October brought us two new personal records. First, the monthly views hit 52,944 – our second month over 50,000. Two, we had a record day of 7,350. Two things happened that day. One, Google put up a banner about the anniversay of Little Nemo in Slumberland. We have put up an extensive Little Nemo gallery culled from the Digital Comic Museum archives, and boy did it pay off in hits that day. We made all our Little Nemo posts “sticky” and Google obligingly sent us much love. Then, someone on Reddit shared our collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles splash pages by Michael Zulli. That actually brought more traffic than Little Nemo!

Life as an Affiliate: All the traffic is translating into more clicks for our affiliate links at MyComicShop and Amazon. Hey, we worked hard to make it easy for people, creating a little section on (almost) every post clearly labeled “Collector’s Guide.” That way, people know what links are references and what links will take them to stores. We figured that was better than randomly peppering posts with affiliate links, and the readers seem to agree. No one likes being dragged to some store if they want more information, but people do want to know where to click if they want to buy. Fixing that for our readers involved untold hours of going back to old posts and editing them all to make the “Collector’s Guide” consistent, but it was well worth it. We won’t even go into the time we spend tracking down every possible reprint to give you more buying and pricing options!

Speaking of which, thank you for each and every item you buy through our site. You could go anywhere, but when you do it here, we get some store credit (NOT cash) to buy more comics. What do we get? Fun stuff! For example, we recently got a couple Marvel Treasury Editions of Conan and the Jack Kirby Thor one. They are huge and lots of fun. Between the Longbox Graveyard’s review of the Barry Smith Conan stories and a friend’s sending us an original from 1972 (minus the cover), we decided to give the Cimmerian classics a shot. We were not disappointed! Also, Rick Griffin’s collection of art in comic book format The Man from Utopia. It is mind-blowing! Huge Rick Griffin fans, we’ll share some of that with you next year. Normally we don’t buy books in that price range. Thanks to you, our indie comic collection just got that much more awesome!

Reddit Strategy: Speaking of Reddit, let’s share our strategy. We take a different approach than most bloggers, and it seems to be working well. People on Reddit – especially in niche subreddits like r/comicbooks – are sick to frickin’ death of people posting their blogs. So, we take a splash page and post the URL for the image itself, not our blog post. We respect the subreddit by including the issue and the artist name in the post title in brackets. Then, we tag it with ‘comic excerpt’ flair – just so everyone knows this is not blogspam! Images tend to do well in upvotes because they only take a second to view and get that upvote click.

But, as soon as we post, we go in and leave a comment: something along the lines of “Click here to read more of this issue if you like.” Very non-spammy, transparent, and clearly a link to more info. Those links from within the comments get plenty of clicks! Maybe people like the fact that we’re not trying to drive traffic to yet another blog with the post itself. Finally, as a thank you to the readers, we monitor the posts throughout the next day or two. We respond to people, engage in discussion, submit more relevant links if people have questions, and – last but not least – upvote every single comment anybody leaves. Maybe that encourages comments, maybe not.

Readership versus Searchability: One last thing before we wrap up. We really doubt we have that many regular readers. You know: people who jump out of bed in the morning thrilled to see our post of the day. While we enjoy our regulars and their comments and love to engage in discussion, we have really taken an entirely different track on readership. We are not really trying to establish an “audience.” That’s a super-tough goal. Lots of people on the web are clamoring for our attention every day – along with the rest of what we need to get done in life. So, we work towards being the site that comes up when people are searching the web for comic books and related topics. Everything we do is geared for being search-friendly. Here are some ways we do that:

Daily Posts – Search engines love fresh, relevant, consistently posted content on a topic. Posting often says you must know a lot or at least have a lot of information.

Series – If a subject is worth covering once, it’s worth covering a dozen times. Search engines see that you post regularly about a topic, and it tells them you must have lots of relevant information. Rather than writing a magnum opus about Jack Kirby’s monsters, for example, we’re posting daily – and briefly – about them for about two weeks.

Key Words – Not only do we try to use key words people might actually use in their searches, we review what search terms bring people to our page. If we see a few hits on a topic, and we have that topic, we add tags that exactly match the search terms. For example: Back when people were searching for who the creepy guy was at the end of the Avengers movie, we went back to our article on that and added tags that matched some of the searches that were trickling in. After we made our tags match those search terms, the floodgates opened on that post. It rocketed in hits to be one of our most popular.

Image titles – If you are uploading images, pay attention to their file names! Uploading “w554fximg.jpg” serves little purpose. Rename it “jack kirby thor splash page 1.jpg” before you upload it! Then, when search engines crawl your image files, the file names match people’s search terms.

Updates – Every now and then someone gives us new information that would strengthen an old post. For example, we didn’t know a Man-Thing omnibus came out recently until someone told us. We dropped everything to go back and update every single post in our Man-Thing archives with links to buy the omnibus. Sometimes updating an old post with better links and more information has turned a lonely, un-viewed oldie into a flurry of hits.

Report from Martian Headquarters, October 2012 A.D.

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quarterly report

When did it become the second week of October?! We broadcast our quarterly report to you from within the depths a massive time warp. Some cool stuff happened while we navigated the vortices and vertices of transdimensional hyperspace.

Our honorable co-conspirator Paul O’Connor at Longbox Graveyard had a birthday, so drop by and wish him well! He’s also been cranking out podcasts and has expanded his postings to more days of the week, in addition to writing several columns on other sites. We’ve been following him from maybe his first month, and watching the LBG grow ever since!

Jim Lawson began publishing his Paleo series online, one page a day, at no charge. We hope this effort brings his amazing dinosaur comic to a wider audience. It can be hard to find all the issues in print, but you can usually find the collected Paleo TPB of the first six issues easily. And believe us, the 7th and 8th issues are well worth the effort it will take you to track them down for a complete set. We just got them last month – a huge tyrannosaur-sized thank you to Jim and Colin for that! Our post about his follow-up series Paleo: Loner remains one of our most popular pages – probably because it got linked to from Jim’s site. We are honored!

We haven’t had much time to publicize Mars the last couple of months, but it made us happy to see io9 pick up our post about the first issue of Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Check out the io9 article on Jonathan Hickman’s plans for Avengers.

Coming up this month: We are going to treat you to as many Ray Bradbury stories from our EC Comics collection as we humanly can. We’ll be running them almost every day from October 10 to October 31. You will get our handy guide to their publication history in every post, along with the usual helpful links to see what issues you can currently buy.

Coming up this month: We received a ton of great self-published indie comics to review recently! Later this month you can enjoy a review of a different new indie title every day for about a week. Just give us a chance to crawl out from under our homework and we will rock your world!

Coming up this month: You’ll also see a week of daily poetry posts this week. We wrangled just enough time to write a little bit on the side recently, and we dug out a few old favorites from the vault to round out a full week.

Last but not least, our goofy monthly stats chart! It felt good to watch that stats ticker roll over 400,000. Strangely enough, though page views were down two months in a row, our affiliate sales at Amazon and MyComicShop went up. (And, we hit new highs for follows, shares, and likes – go figure!) Thank you as always for the box of free comics we got with our store credit. We’re loving them! Remember, we don’t make money from your purchases, but we do get a store credit that helps us buy more books to rave about maniacally and share with you.

Thank you so much for dropping by and rapping about our mutual passion – comic books! Without our readers we would be nothing.

A Memo from Your Martian Administrator

Tags

quarterly report

Every day for 20 months we’ve pumped comic book awesomeness into the internet. It helps us unwind between pursuing our college degrees, taking care of our business customers in our not-so-secret identity, pursuing whatever art or music project calls out to us, and seeing what our cat wants.

We enjoy connecting with other readers and corresponding about our favorite stories. You helped us discover more titles and stories, from the latest self-published books to hidden treasures in the vaults of comic history. We have fun hanging out with you in Martian cyberspace!

Our daily postings will continue for at least another year. After that, we will need to hang a shiny new bachelor’s degree on our wall next summer and probably start a master’s program. Only Dr. Doom’s time machine can tell us if we’ll have time to keep up then!

For now, having completed six weeks of homework, quizzes, and the final exam for an Applied Statistics class called Quantitative Methods in Business in just four days, we are going to take a nap. Program the robots to guard the perimeter! Inform the Justice League we cannot make the meeting on the satellite today!

Until tomorrow, we leave you with this goofy chart of our first 20 months.

Mars Celebrates 200,000 Views

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comic book blogs, quarterly report

200,000. That’s a big number. Did you know scientists believe the biggest number is 45,000,000,000? Some speculate that even larger numbers exist.

Ok, maybe that’s not true. But what do we know? We only got a 100.6% in our statistics class last semester, which should be statistically impossible.

Do you remember what you did before blog technology? No, we don’t either. Something involving this weird stuff known as nature, maybe. Or this place we read about called “the outside world.”

But we have evidence life existed before blogging. At least creationists and evolutionists can all agree on that. In fact, both sides agree that the age of the universe may date back as far as 1982. In 1982, we were working on a strange technology known as paper. Paper is a substance made out of old computer printouts and egg cartons run through a wood chipper, with essential vitamins and flavors added.

Our ancestors taught us how to form primitive letters from paper using analog cut-and-paste technology called scissors. The ancient ones hoped we would use this technology for the good of all humankind. We decided that was a dumb idea. Instead, we cut out the names of superheroes and comic books.

Thank you for dropping by and reading comic books with us!
It’s a strange hobby, but someone’s got to do it. We have many more fun things to explore and share with you. So, put on your bathrobe, quit your day job, and click away!

Mars Celebrates 150,000 Views!

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quarterly report

It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating 100,000 page views. Actually, it was 2 months ago! Now we’re over 150K? What in the shibbidy-hoo is going on here?

Grab a beer and treat yourself, Martians! (And dig our brand new banner while you’re at it.) We hoped Mars would catch on, but this exceeds our expectations.

Thank you for dropping by and reading comic books with us. It’s always a pleasure when your space capsule docks at our mothership. Keep it cosmic, mutate yourself often, and watch out for rampaging dinosaurs!

Mars is only 15 months old but we've been geeks a long time. Here's a Halloween pic from 1977 to prove it. Our sister reports 'Spider-man appers so much in our family photos that it's like I had a second sibling!'

Mars Hulks Out at One Hundred Thousand!

Tags

Hulk Pajamas, quarterly report

“When we started this band, back in the day, it was merely a laugh.”
-Motley Crue

We launched Mars on WordPress on January 8, 2011. That first month saw only 300 page views. Now it’s February 1, 2012, and our stat ticker just rolled over 100,000. That makes us feel like hulking out in some Hulk pajamas!

Thank you for dropping by and sharing the comic book love.

Why Comic Book Blogging Totally Rules: 2011 in Review

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quarterly report

In January 2011, we launched Mars on WordPress with a stack of comics and a dream of comic book utopia. A place where mutants and dinosaurs battled daily in a field of giant ants powered by super brains from space just as the galaxy was incinerated… And so began what Paul calls our “un-hinged ravings” about our favorite comic books.

We set two simple rules.

Rule One: If someone wants their work taken down, we will take it down. So far, that’s happened twice. Both times, everyone was happy in the end.

Rule Two: If it sucks, we don’t waste time on it. We are not critics. We don’t use server space on comics we don’t like, and we don’t have anything bad to say about anyone working in the field.

So, what happened? We had a really wordy diatribe planned for you but scrapped it all in favor of this picture:

That big Silver Surfer painting comes from Iain Carstairs – a fellow Jack Kirby fan and the brains behind Science and Religion. All the way from the UK to our wall – Cosmically Awesome! Two paintings above it are our own Kirby-inspired images, a direct result of rapping with Iain about The King.

And that’s what has really rocked the most about Mars: connecting to other fans and creative types. Blogging as a personal monologue is fun, but using it as a way to facilitate a dialogue – an exchange of ideas, memorabilia, and correspondence – is even better.

We used to be the only nerd on our block who liked comic books. Now we’ve got people sending us CD’s with dinosaur comic scans. (Thank you, Dale!) Authors of dinosaur books sending us bitchin’ dino T-Shirts. (Thank you, JP!) Comic book authors sending us autographed copies of their work. (Thank you, Paul!) Authors of comics we feature dropping by to say thanks and telling us where to find their current work. (Thank you, Reggie, Gene, and Marc!) Publishers sending us promotional images. (Thank you, IDW!) People picking up our scans of out-of-print indie comics and introducing them to their friends.

Heck, we’re even tickled when people reference our posts to settle such all-important debates as “In which galaxy did Storm tap into the power of the galactic core to kill the alien inside her?” Yes, our scans settled that question on the CBR forums. Our mother must be so proud!

Also, thanks to people clicking through our affiliate links to My Comic Shop, we enjoyed a big box of comic books totally free this year. Martians, thank you! There are a million places you can buy comics. Buying them through our links just makes one geek incredibly happy. We appreciate it, and we hope you enjoyed your books as much as we did!

Life is good.
Life with comic books is awesome!

BLAH BLAH BLAH TIME
You can stop reading now if you want… We’re going to review our year in terms of what fans liked the most, what brings people to this site, and so on. You know, stats. You’re obsessed with them, we’re obsessed with them, and someday when we hit a million page views we can look back and laugh.

Monthly Stats:

Obviously, no one knew we existed in January. We got 300 hits our first month. Now, we look at 300 views as a slow day. Every month we look for some new way to pump those stats. Do they mean anything? Maybe. But our image configuration artifically inflates them a bit. The way we have our image galleries set up, each image has its own page URL. So, if one person looks at all 30 pages of a comic we shared, that seems to count for 30 separate hits. While we’re thrilled to have more than 16,000 page views in November, it doesn’t translate as 16,000 unique visitors. Still, we love comics and we love that you love looking at comics we love. Rock.

Top Referrers:
1. Google Image Search loves us most. (Sometimes we worry people are just viewing an image and not visiting the site at all???) All other forms of Google in more than 40 countries love us second most.
2. Reddit loves us third most, even if we have to tell them ourselves.
3. Web site that sends us the most traffic: Diversions of the Groovy Kind. (Thanks, Groove!)
4. Twitter and Facebook like us fifth and sixth most. It seems to be not our own direct efforts but re-postings by others. Glad someone is enjoying this lunacy!
5. WordPress itself sends visitors in several ways (tags, .com, dashboards, search – in that order.) Just being on WP gets exposure and we like that.

Top Search Terms:
1. Jack Kirby
2. Age of Reptiles
3. Galactus
4. EC Comics
5. Jungle Girl

That’s the general trend, anyway. There’s a lot of “Jack Kirby Galactus” and “Jack Kirby Art” and so on – reconfigurations of these terms. Mental Note: We need to get a copy of the EC Comics story “Eye for an Eye.” People are looking for it and coming here, but we don’t have it. UPDATE: We have it now! Click Here: An Eye for an Eye.

Our favorite search terms: “what is the deal with mars will send no more” – Ha! See our Secret Origin, dude! Even better is “gonads in my ears.” If you Google “gonads in my ears” – and someone has – we are the TOP of the list on Google. YES! This is why we get out of bed in the morning and scan comics.

Top Clicks:
1. Our revised image of Galactus saying “Mars Will Send No More!”
2. Followed by several ‘bad trip’ double splashes from No Hero.
3. Site we refer to most: KirbyDynamics.blogspot.com
4. Most clicked affiliate link: Captain Victory at My Comic Shop.

Top 10 Posts:
These are only ranked as individual posts when they are no longer the most recent post on our Home Page, as far as we can tell. If 1000 people drop by our Home Page, whatever is posted that day does not get ranked as its own post – it gets ranked as “Home Page.” “Home Page” accounts for slightly less than half our site views. (That suggests we don’t have a regular readership as much as we have an archive of stuff people are searching for, don’t you think?) We’re not counting our Secret Identity, Secret Origin, and Sea Monkeys pages – although they are all in the top 10. People come here looking for Sea Monkeys! We like that a lot! Anyway, here’s what Martians dug the most in 2011.

1. This is the Worst Trip Ever!
Double splashes from the horrifc bad trip in the Ellis/Ryp ‘No Hero.’
2. Origin of Galactus!
People want to know where the big G is from. We can help.
3. Jim Lawson’s Paleo: Loner!
Get hip to Jim Lawson’s pure dino fury now.
4. His Mechanical Brain is Charged with All Knowledge!
Complete EC Comics story “Judgment Day” addressing racism.
5. Armadillos of the Surreal!
The second issue of Armadillo Comics, out of print since the 1970s and totally awesome. This one got reblogged several times and linked to from an Austin, TX news story. Yes! The world needs more Armadillo Comics!
6. All I’ve Got to Worry about Is Shooting My Dinosaur!
A complete EC Comics story adapting Ray Bradbury’s ‘Sound of Thunder.’
7. Preeeeeeeesenting: The Women’s Texas Championship!
We had no idea so many people would be interested in the Hernandez Brothers’ take on female wrestling, but these images got re-blogged several times.
8. Nathan, I Don’t Want to Die Alone!
Mutates doing the deed in the dark by the glow of infrared in John Byrne’s Next Men. That’s hot!
9. Swamp Thing: Rite of Spring!
Everyone needs to become one with the universal biosphere at least once in their lives. We can help.
10. Jim Lee X-Men Posters 3!
Snobby bloggers bash Jim Lee. We celebrate him.

That about wraps it up for 2011! Stay tuned, because 2012 is going to be so insane that we’ll need to conquer another solar system to host it all.