The Warren Ellis Forum is dead. Long Live The New Flesh. After four years, Warren decided to call it a day and get back to writing, rather than spending sixteen hours out of twenty-four flirting with his many female fans. The WEF comprised a total of 25,000 members during its lifetime (incidentally that's more people than who bought Transmetropolitan last month), and it provided a home for lively discussion about comic theory, comic titles, current news, films, music, and Giant Death Robots. It created movements, memes, various satellite groups (such as The V Forum and Grammarporn), and, hell, it almost single-handedly saved Top Shelf Comics from bankruptcy when their distributor filed for Chapter 11 protection. Over $20,000 of comics were purchased. In one afternoon. Companies such as Cyberosia, Oni, and AiT/PlanetLar used the forum to promote their works, advertising to a more diverse audience than would be normally found on a comics website, and reaped the benefits. We were mighty. We were Making Comics Better.

Sadly, there was a flipside to all this. The WEF at times resembled little more than a personality cult centred on Warren's rather Spider Jerusalem-like online persona. Sycophancy ran high, with many posters regurgitating Warren's screeds about superhero comics and work-for-hire contracts. The forum was regarded by most other Internet comics communities as being too elitist for its own good. After Warren's blistering 'This Is What You Want' discussion, where he highlighted that many people on the Forum were talking up a storm, but continued to buy the same superhero comics every week, there was a definite decline in the atmosphere. The WEF had a strict moderation policy to prevent flame wars in the USENET style, but the satellite fora were not so controlled. Instead of preventing the bickering, all the 'Stalinist' moderation did was move it to the satellites. In someways, this was even worse than the USENET system, as it just built resentment rather than dealing with things out in the open; people explored various forums such as Memecenter to find that they were being mocked mercilessly. The 'old-guard' WEF posters drifted away from the forum, many saying that the sycophancy of the newer crowd, plus less interesting threads to participate in, meant that they were less interested in the forum now, Ellis attempted to cut back on the extraneous threads, especially the news threads that sprialed out of control whenever somebody brought up Israel. But it didn't seem to help much. I imagine that eventually, it just got boring to Warren. People kept on asking the same questions, month after month, and Delphi's removal of the search facility for guest users made things worse. The ending of Transmetropolitan gave Ellis an escape hatch, which he used with glee.

Having said all that, I'm glad that the WEF existed. Without it, I wouldn't have discovered the work of people such as Matt Wagner, Jason Lutes, Carla Speed McNeil, Wong Kar-Wai, and Takashi Miike. I wouldn't have started up this site, I wouldn't have got back into writing comics again, and I probably wouldn't be sitting here in America writing this (I had several discussions with a CS grad student on the forum, which convinced me to apply). It was the best arena for comics discussion anywhere on the planet, and I'm going to miss it a lot.

We were the WEF. We were Mighty. Now it's time to go outside. It's a wonderful world; let's go exploring...