Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinWhere legends live since 1969

July 14th, 1994.

§ November 22nd, 2023 § Filed under dc comics § 2 Comments

Just a brief almost-Low Content Mode today, so what I have here are some of the oldest digital images I have in my possession, downloaded via my America Online account. I think it was from an official DC Comics section on AOL.

The date in the subject line to this post appears to be when they were acquired, or at least copied to an old floppy disk before getting backed up to a CD-ROM. As such, I’m not sure of the exact date, but regardless it’s still about three decades ago.

Of course among these pics (converted from their original giF format to these here newfangled jay-pegs)would be some Swamp Thing, like this neat color-hold image:

…and a more traditional preview panel from the comics:

Here’s another color-hold pic, this time from the Vertigo Jonah Hex books:

Here’s an interesting illustration of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman:

…and here’s an image from (I believe) Jerry Ordway’s Shazam! graphic novel:

This is the sort of thing where I’d wished I’d kept better notes as to what has going on at the time re: the online comics world in the early World Wide Web days. If only someone would have told me then I’d start doing a comics blog about ten years later, to which I’d say, of course [old joke coming in], “what’s a blog?”

I’m pretty sure the DC area on AOL was what you’d expect, “coming attractions” and blurbs and images promo-ing their product, but at this late date I can’t even picture what it looked like. I do have a better memory of the general comics message boards that AOL hosted around that same time (I can even remember a screen name or two of other users), where there seemed to be a lot of focus on price speculation. (That may have been earlier than 1994, before the market crash began to take hold.)

I’m sure someone out there has a better retrospective of the early comic book presence on AOL. But all I have are these images, backed up decades ago to floppies, then backed up again to CD-ROMs, and probably someday backed up to whatever new file storage format I end up using next. Not sure what I’ll use them for again, since posting them to this site is probably the only real use I’ll get out of them aside from occasionally pulling them up on my computer when browsing old files and feeling nostalgic for a time I barely remember.