The 2014 State of Comic Crack Address

As I always do, I like to have a review of the year that has just passed and when the following year comes, I look at what I said the previous year and see what I felt then and reminisce about how thing ultimately turned out. I just read what I said after 2012 and I quoted myself as saying my personal life in 2013 would determine if Comic Crack still existed by the end of 2013 and in reality, it was all very true. Like it or not, I have no way around it. The two were directly tied together and as I faced personal struggles, so too did the site suffer and it's existence was tied to the fate of mine.

Thankfully, after a lot of struggles and some losses in life, I did survive by the grace of God and so too did Comic Crack. In no way was it a good year for either of us but just like in my personal life, 2013 was slightly better than 2012. I came into 2013 after 2 years of posts being cut in half, with a goal of meeting 2012's numbers and we barely did just that, beating it by 38 posts.

My year had little to do with comics and comics collecting but for most of the year I was selling comics on eBay and sold roughly 1,000 comics and made about $8,000 which was my only source of income for the year. With finances being a main issue, I would ultimately struggle to stay online and at times I had no avenue to post as at times I had no internet access and eventually I would end the year with just cheap cellphone service abilities. For this reason, my posting suffered but I did manage to post a bit more than the previous year.

Once again this place was literally a ghost town with Defiant1 remaining the only regular poster and an occasional visit happened by bigw1966 and whetteon, but otherwise, we were dead.

Underdog was a great moderator who spent the year designing the new version 5 of this site which is due to hit this board any time after I post this. Thanks to him, we are pretty much ready for the change but the new site will present it's own problems and take awhile to work out.

I thank all those who spent any time here and now that the year ended, I find myself pretty much finished with all the loses and finally feeling a rare bit of optimism but also know I'm personally still deep in the woods.

As before, I would make the goal of what we did this past year as a goal for this year, but I feel it's going to be even harder to reach this year. The key is whether I can finally prosper in my personal life and get back into the swing of things. I have professed that I am going hard at 2014 and I have hit the year with a running start. If I can get things going in the right direction, perhaps it will reflect in what goes on in the site. I keep my expectations low at this point but I am cautiously optimistic. The key has been making the bleeding stop and now it's time to create a tiny bit of momentum. I'm hoping that when I make my address in 2015, there is more positive things to talk about than I've had to go with in a long, long time.