How I Discovered Cheeks and Found Peace

A cascade of unfortunate circumstances may cost e-fandom an important voice on the Web. The hammer driving the nail into the coffin might belong to the purchasers of Simplenet, the hosting service where Cheeks, The Toy Wonder page resided for years; the new owners, after the venerable tradition of flint-hearted money-grubbing vampires throughout history, made the eminent Cheeks' secret identity K.O. an offer almost anyone could refuse.

While other factors certainly remain important, the essence of this particular problem centers around the amount of material Cheeks has provided, somewhere in the range of 800-900 megabytes of scanned graphics and text. Combine the amount of material with the popularity Cheeks has accumulated over the years, and one has a formula for the consumption of a lot of bandwidth. The hosting ghouls, for their part, seem intent on charging by the bit.

As an ominous downside, Cheeks now considers, as one option, moving on from the Cheeks the Toy Wonder site, possibly following a vacation from web journalism to return later with something less ambitious, which may explore other interests he entertains, such as movies and/or music.

This development should trouble all of us who recognize his handle, both comics fans who encountered his behemoth site during trancelike day-long sessions of surfing the Web (much to the detriment of our housekeeping, possibly to our homework, and possibly to our relationships with the balance of humanity) and those of us who attempt to wade into the waters of amateur comics journalism on the Web.

For a number of reasons, the fate of Cheeks, the Toy Wonder matters to us.

The Godfather of Amateur Comics Journalism on the Web

Prior to discovering Cheeks and his site, I had a different understanding of web pages about comics. What I learned to expect, from experience, might have one or two pages, one with a page full of badly-edited scans of Cyclops of the X-Men, another with a comprehensive bibliography of his appearances that seemed to contain nothing before 1995.

Consider visions of the planet earth before life evolved (or was created; its origin does not matter for this discussion). Visualize a terrain of rocks and dirt, of steaming muddy vents of boiling water from the interior. Imagine a choking atmosphere of carbon dioxide and dust. The Pathfinder image to the right comes from Mars, but might well serve as a view of the surface of the Earth in prebiotic times. Between storms and volcanic eruptions, Saturday night mostly amounted to this.

The web pages about comics, prior to the evolution of Cheeks, much remind me of such a barren landscape. Life had not yet appeared, though the raw materials seemed in evidence: Scanned pictures and text, as components, appeared in various places, but nothing moved. One could not call a page titled Wolverine, Punisher, and Cable: The Kewlest of the Kewl "life."

Just as life required a precise combination of the material elements that make up proteins, amino acids, and other key pieces of a modern living organism, comics journalism required a correct mixture. This mixture required critical amounts of experience, of enthusiasm, of intelligence, of humor, and of access to the material that provided the subject. Web pages lacking in one or more of these ingredients would not gestate; they would simply stew in a gooey mass of misspellings, semantics-free verbiage, broken links, ugly backgrounds, amateurishly-doctored transparent GIFs, and bad taste.

Then, like Athena from Zeus' brow, the Cheeks the Toy Wonder page appeared in my search engine. Had I done better research - for instance, plaguing Cheeks with personal questions about when and how and why he did things - I could provide exact figures about when the page first appeared, but we can assume some Usher-like date of July 4, 4004 AD for the purposes of argument (a plausible figure, since, though it would take around 6000 years to invent comic books and computers, it takes a long time to put together close to a gigabyte of material to post on the Web).

With the appearance of the Cheeks page, the ur-page of readable amateur comics journalism on the Web, an entirely new evolutionary pressure appeared for comics web pages. A one-paragraph HTML file describing Guy Gardner's ten best fights could no longer compete for delusions of validity. And, from that point, we might well designate the period of comics web pages the Age of Cheeks.

The Search Engine Factor

How, you might ask, could a single web page create an effect that might expand beyond the material it contained? To begin with, again mixing metaphors, a great mass in cyberspace will attract smaller particles to itself thanks to gravity. Even where such a mass does not appear to the naked eye (or to the aided eye), one can discern its presence from the manner in which it bends the path of moving objects, how it deflects light, and how it draws things towards itself. Note the illustration to the right, a graphical representation of gravity waves.

Queries about comics, via search engines like AltaVista, tended to fall inward towards the gravity well of the Cheeks, the Toy Wonder page. During a certain period of my own history - shortly after I became Intenet-enabled but before I ventured into the field of amateur comics journalism - I kept noting that most of my questions about comics turned up one particular site.

Whether I skewed questions to Cheeks' themes or not, my web searches kept falling into that particular gravity well.

Domination by Quantity and Quality

A casual passerby might note, once pulled into CheeksLand by a search engine query (or, more abstractly, Cheeks gravity) that the volume of material that resided there became increasingly monolithic. Cheeks hit 100 columns at some point in the distant past, then kept gathering momentum as he blazed past 150, 200, 250, and 300.

Nor do we need to misuse quantity as a measure of quality here; this material remained fairly relentless on both fronts, displaying a clarity of vision that Cheeks consistently maintained and managed to articulate to the world on the other side of the monitor. Where the topic required mercy, he administered it; where it deserved derision, he applied it without self-consciousness or regret.

And, in the process, he took time to give the whole business the once-over razzing due any endeavor that centers on muscular men in custom-dyed longjohns and capes who make their living by appearing in magazines to beat on each other for the amusement of readers. Folks who dispensed with long underwear in favor of leather pants received even less mercy.

Defending the Honor of the Silver Age

When I originally gave up comics in 1983, I didn't think much of material from a period we would come to recognize as "the Silver Age." I saw bits and pieces of it in the 100-page giants that DC released around 1973 and 1974; I saw small samples of it in Marvel's reprint mags like Marvel's Greatest Comics.

My tastes had skewed from exposure to some of the first comics I read, things like the Thomas / Adams X-Men (just prior to the cancellation of that book), the O'Neil / Adams Green Lantern / Green Arrow (just prior to the cancellation of that book), the Avengers run anthologized in the Kree-Skrull War trade paperback (one of the few Marvel pieces I looked forward to in my days as a DC loyalist), and a lot of books that dragged me in on visual appeal and owed to a relevance-era editorial model.

Therefore, to me the Silver Age meant things like the Fox-Sekowsky Justice League of America, where Wonder Woman wore this ridiculous girdle and the superheroes always teamed off in twos or threes and did the same thing, essentially, with a different villain apiece (as I saw it then); or too many pieces by Jack Kirby (so I thought at the time, since I wouldn't appreciate Kirby's work until I entered my thirties - go figure).

Though I consumed a great deal of all things Superman and Batman in my heyday, one must note that either product differed much in post-1970 form from what had appeared in the Silver Age. Dick Sprang's Batman in the Giant Object Era and the relentlessly bizarre Weisinger-era Superman left little trace in the versions that appeared in print after 1970. When I did see reprints of this material, it impressed me (or, rather, failed to impress me) with its silliness, which, to an annoyingly self-important young man, seemed like a violation of the fundamental gravitas due the form. Yes, I actually thought men with their underwear outside their pants deserved dignified treatment - and I credit such thoughts with a strangeness certainly on a scale with anything that came out of the brow of Mort Weisinger. My negative opinion more or less vulcanized when I began seeing material like the Claremont / Byrne X-Men and the Wolfman / Perez New Teen Titans.

It took the passage of time, the accumulation of gray hairs, viewing the material of the Silver Age in context, and the vehement outpourings of Cheeks, the Pindar of the Silver Age, to allow me to reconsider, whereupon I concluded that a) this period gestated just about every attribute of superhero comics that I liked and b) the material aged well, remaining solid when compared to ephemeral, faddish, and ugly pieces that followed the implosion of the Silver Age edifice in the 1980s.

In 1979, perhaps Superman's ethos seemed priggish and unlikely. Slightly over ten years later, when Big Goons with Big Guns demonstrated coolness through body counts, one could, without shame, ache for the avuncular Schwartz-era Superman as a much-needed antidote to the nihilism of the comics that would follow.

On many levels, Cheeks inclined me to reconsider my initial rejection of the Silver Age of Comics. I began to see delicate nuance in faces delineated by Dick Dillin, a talent I never appreciated during his days on Justice League of America; I started putting my nose into Essentials volumes, whereas before the only sixties Marvel material that had meant anything to me had appeared in Steve Ditko-era Spider-Man and Dr. Strange stories, plus (of course) any Roy Thomas Avengers piece.

If, in 1981, I might wallow in self-congratulation for having realized "We've come a long way, baby!" as I sneered at what the comics of the sixties had to offer, by 1998 I could ask "What have we lost?"

Cheeks catalyzed this paradigm shift. And, though I do not contend that the comics of the Silver Age represent the Mecca towards which all things should orient themselves (in fact, some of the innovations of the period proved vital in the short run and toxic in the long), I now can enjoy and respect the material, perhaps as a safe harbor from which I can sail out to experiment with other forms from other times.

A Place to Steal Pictures

A number of talents of the Silver Age and early post-Silver Age haven't, sometimes, received the credit due them for their achievements, partially because of short attention spans of consumers, partially because of a shift in aesthetic principles, and partially, I suspect, because of something like planned obsolescence.

Thus, when I sought to concoct a page about David Cockrum, I found that, absent comics I no longer possessed (in a day preceding the publication of Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 10), I had utterly no place to find samples of his Legion work, the material that earned him name recognition.

As my information sources became better, and as more and more of the limited floor space in my apartment gave way to boxes of comics (of quality ranging from excellent to negative), as my prosperity allowed me decadent purchasing habits like buying $50 Archives volumes if I wanted them, it became less and less necessary to dredge images from Cheeks. Thus, on this page, you can find a few, but not too many, pieces that originated there.

Nonetheless, I discovered, and rediscovered, that occasional questions along the lines of "where can I find this?" tended to point to a single answer. If I couldn't find it anywhere, I could find it in CheeksHeim - obscure things like the dreaded Wonder Woman White Pantsuit pictures, or some of the atrocious costumes that Supergirl went through between her first costume and the chees(ecake)y hotpants costume she wore throughout the seventies.

Ultimately, I began steering my own questions away, whenever possible, from topics that required such pilferage. A mighty beast can host many purple ticks, but shouldn't have to endure any. Nonetheless, through a long period of development of my own page, I knew that the limitations of my own comics collection - with about a dozen comics before 1980 - need not prohibit me from discussing and displaying material from the Silver Age.

The Seminal Function

One can consider a work seminal when it inspires other things. "Seminal" productions, therefore, have the generative property of a seed. With the "Cheeks, the Toy Wonder" site, the discussions tended either to ask the questions that launched other, important questions, or recognized materials in such a way that could generate further debate.

Furthermore, by exceeding expectations of the frequently blighted landscape of amateur comics journalism on the Web, Cheeks raised standards in general for what a web page about comics should contain and how it should deliver. Perhaps, in the early days of public access to the Internet, one might expect little better than a scan of Cyclops, a heading ("Cyclops is so KEWL!"), some misspelled and semiliterate text, and an ugly background to make the text unreadable (mercifully).

In some ways, I credit the Cheeks site with inspiring me to develop my own page. A combination of factors in the late nineties, including my discovery of something strange existing in the place that once contained what I knew as "comics," inclined me to take up creating my own web page. It might have begun as a lame exploration of a guilty pleasure I had discarded years ago (in my teens) and rediscovered much later (in my thirties). Cheeks showed that one need not deserve stigmata like "cretinous," "childish," "arrested," or any of the usual epithets one expects to attract by consuming comics. He did so doubly for the role of those who generate web pages about comics.

Again in his favor, Cheeks showed us that we need not damn the discussion of comics on the web by such pathetically low expectations. Proving his point by example, he undermined whatever excuses might exist for content-poor, pointless web pages about comics, and demonstrated an understanding that one could examine comics both on aesthetic grounds and by the ideas they contain.

I don't really know how many existing pages owe their existence to the inspiration Cheeks provided, but I imagine a survey of a good sample of folks in the upper ten percent (quality-wise) of web pages would own up either to a) having taken the whole business up after seeing Cheeks in action, or b) having upped their own standards after seeing the way in which Cheeks delivered.

Hence, the term seminal here fits. These works forming the Essential Cheeks Canon have caused others to sprout here and there in sympathy or in imitation; and they have, furthermore, improved existing ones by showing them how to blossom.

Staying Away and Editorial Independence

A number of times, back in the day when I'd check twice a week for updates on the Cheeks, the Toy Wonder page, I'd note that some theme I wanted to explore had already appeared there, and amateurish courtesy would compel me to drop the subject. Other times, something I read there might inspire me to ask some question that I might well have developed into a column, but in general I set such questions aside until they might reappear in another context.

Without proper discipline, the creator of a comics web site who also reads extensively in Cheeks' material, might risk becoming a footnote to that page. Therefore, in 1999, I mostly restricted my own consumption of Cheeks material, mainly to allow myself to ask the salient questions without having to say "Oh, he already wrote about that," or "Since I didn't buy that interpretation, let me set the record straight."

This improved my ability to ask the right questions. Where comics provides the raw material, it falls on me to provide the analysis (as far as my own page goes); otherwise, the risk of self-referential circular observation, a plague that even hits professional journalists, sets in.

A sense of duty made me read less of Cheeks' material. But this begged a question: I assumed, at the time, that I could count the Cheeks, the Toy Wonder page among the eternal things (such as the sun, the moon, and the stars) and, once I had solidified my own concept, I could return to what I had missed with less danger of resonant imitation.

But we might not enjoy any such good fortune.

The End of the Story?

Cheeks may intend to pack it in. I can't qualify this decision as set in stone, nor as permanent, but details suggest this as a likely course. With the sellout of Simplenet to others (I don't know if the new owners have bothered to register the domain Greedy-SOB-Net yet), unkind bean-counters have decided that the service they offer merits a payment on the scale of a mortgage payment to allow Cheeks to present his material. Wisdom suggests that those fortunate enough to earn the bucks to afford a mortgage payment should apply it to a mortgage payment, not to hobbies, however these hobbies may inspire.

So, therefore, late in November 2000, I heard an ugly ground swell of rumor that the Cheeks, the Toy Wonder page might come down soon, pending when BloodsuckingLeechNet decides to demand its pound of flesh. This left a few of us in a scramble the following weekend - myself and the young stalwart Juzda downloading death-march style in an attempt to create an archive (my task) and to create a mirror site (Juzda's task). At the very least we guaranteed the survival of the material generated thus far, which, owing to demands on time and the ever-popular Death of a Hard disk, had no existing backup in the author's possession.

Juzda pointed folks to the Cheeks archive he created, with some caveats about how the new hosting site will transform into another version of IntestinalParasiteNet should too many surfers push the bandwidth up too high there. I, for my part, sent a few folks CD-ROM versions of the Cheeks Archive I brought down locally.

While such strategies can preserve the past, what can we do about the future? I don't really intend to encourage anyone to resume something from which the joy has fled, and Cheeks might, like all of us, suffer from burnout now and then. It runs against my own nature to talk people into things that they don't want to do.

However, for my own part, I can do at least this: I can make a case about why I don't want to see the Cheeks, the Toy Wonder Page, vanish from the earth forever, regardless of what Unca Cheeks has planned for the future. To this end, of course, I have this particularly long-winded discussion; and, if anyone reading this has a web page, I strongly advocate following suit with more pieces about Why Cheeks Matters, How Cheeks Shaped My Worldview, and What Kind of World Would We Live in Without Cheeks?

As well, the occasional email of encouragement couldn't hurt anything. Cheeks has a number of email addresses, but I only recall him mentioning [email protected] on the web page proper. Sometimes the avalanche of e-missives buries the poor man for weeks at a time, so use a civilized degree of restraint here; but, should the worst-case scenario prevail here, we can at least let him know the size of the hole his departure will leave.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at [email protected].

Column 213. Completed 06-JAN-2001.