The webcomics blog about webcomics

Woke To Sad News

We lost Joey Manley last night.

If you weren’t familiar with Manley, reading any social media feed populated by webcomickers will give you an idea of how important he was in the nascent days of this weird little medium. He promoted webcomics, built infrastructure for webcomics, would have been perfectly happy to become rich by building up webcomics — but never at the expense of those that created them.

His profile had been much lower in recent years, since he partnered up with money and — in my reading, he would never be so ungracious as to say such a thing — shuffled off to the side by his new partners, the sites that he founded gradually winding down original content and eventually shuttering the doors.

But! Joey Manley won’t be remembered for how his projects ended; he’ll be remembered for how his projects launched dozens, hundreds of careers. He’ll be remembered for being too damn young when he died. He’ll be remembered with a sense of heartbreak for his partner, family, and loved ones.

Rest in peace, Colonel Joey; we were better for having known you.

[…] number of things happened Thursday, but I felt like Friday belonged to Joey. I don’t imagine a slight delay in discussion has changed any of these things too […]

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