by Michelle Klein-Häss
Around this time in 1995, I was in the process of building a dream. For several years I had harbored the idea of putting out an animation fanzine. However, when I researched all the costs for publishing a print magazine, I was hit with definite sticker shock. Even if I opted to print on newsprint, the cheapest option, the costs would have approached somewhere around a grand per issue in 1995 money. That would require a huge out of pocket layout and either a large readership or a healthy group of advertisers.
The World Wide Web changed all that. Suddenly, publishing didn't require the services of printers, distributors and other publishing services. You could buy web space or even obtain web space as part of your account at your Internet Service Provider. And that would be the only price to pay to publish. If you didn't have a computer, buying a second-hand computer, a graphics program and a good text editor would be a fairly inexpensive price to pay.
I built the first version of ANP on, of all things, a Powerbook 145. The PB 145 is a nice, sturdy laptop, and fine for churning out the web code. However, the screen was only a black and white screen...no greyscale, no nothing. I had to depend on the kindness of strangers to check my graphics and make sure the site looked right before it was uploaded.
Soon after ANP started, I wound up with my Performa 460, a solid, reliable little Mac with impeccable Animation Nerd credentials...it was Jim Smith's Mac at Spumco. Last year, our technical capabilities expanded by leaps and bounds with the addition of a PC, which we use primarily as a scanning station.
ANP has moved two times since its establishment on the servers of The Loop: once to 2 Cow Herd Internet, and again at the beginning of the year as we settled into our permanent home at the state-of-the-art servers of Animation World Network. Currently we get about 200,000 hits a month here at AWN, and the figure has been pretty stable. It's not Yahoo traffic but it's pretty damn good.
I took my idea for an animation magazine and built on it. ANP has gone from being just a personal site to a center of animation fan activity. We have a very active discussion board, online comics and web animation, and will be expanding in the future to include a news area that is not updated daily or weekly, but up to the minute as AWN gets newsworthy items. Some of the areas on our website have fallen by the wayside...we would have loved to review animation-related toys on a regular basis, for example...but we never got the right connections to the toy companies. For that matter, most of the time when we review movies we pay the ticket price and wait in line like everyone else. We're ready for our closeup, Hollywood...or at least for our press credentials.
Recently I had thoughts of packing it in by now. Running a site this big takes a great deal of work, and it was beginning to not be fun for me anymore. But enough people have been encouraging me to keep going, so I think I am going to hang in there. The automation of some of the more tedious updating will help, and also the total re-design of ANP to make updating easier. This will hopefully be accomplished by the first of the year. But remember...I'm the person doing most of the grunt work, and I'm just one person.
To conclude this, I want to give some shouts out to some people who have been friends of ANP over these past three years: Dan Sarto and everyone at AWN; Darrel Bowen, Denine Omand and everyone else connected with the late, great Anvil Anthology Magazine; Jim Smith, Steve Worth and the stalwart bunch at Spumco; Alan Liechty; Norman Sippel; Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman; Thomas Reed; Michael Swanigan; Mark Segal; Greg Segal; Steve Shaw; Pat Duquette; Jerry Beck; Katherine Goodman (no relation to Dr. Toon); Dragan Kovacevic, Joe Bevilacqua and Lorie Kellogg, Bob Cesca, Mel Basham, Smashing Ideas Animation, Joe White and Paul Carhart; and a whole host of others whose names, if I mention them all, would take a hell of a lot of bandwidth to cover. And of course, I would be entirely remiss if I did not mention a person who was a very strong supporter of Animation Nerd's Paradise in life and who was unfairly taken away from us a little over a year ago: the amazing and innovative dimensional animator Fred Stuhr.
(Note as of 6/1/99: Michelle Klein-Häss has decided to no longer update Animation Nerd's Paradise. We thank everyone for their support.)
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Page last updated 6/1/1999
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