Friday, August 12, 2011

Black River Chronicle

The Black River Digital Mailing List was started by Lars Crawley in 1998 with Roger Langridge's first post's subject line, "Is Anybody Out There?".

Created to host discussions on a wide range of subjects relating to the creation, production and marketing of comics in New Zealand, The mailing list is now populated by practitioners and enthusiasts of New Zealand comics all over the world.

Here's some back-story from Lars Crawley on BRD's twelfth anniversary,

Long, long ago there was a publication called Black River Chronicle that Dylan and I put together. We did this because we liked it when people wrote and talked about comics, and we also really liked our friend's comics. So we talked to our friends who made comics and then wrote about that. Sadly there was only one issue of that valiant magazine available to the public. Dylan was nearly run over by a horse and carriage on the way to the chandlers with the second issue, and in the melee the manuscript came loose and it was never seen again. Later I invented the internet and hosted something called The Black River Chronicle Mailing List on my PC. Its purpose was so closely aligned with our original intentions that a name derived from that old magazine seemed apt. Being hosted on my machine meant that it had to be running and connected to the Internet to receive and pass messages on. In the pre-broadband days this was only once in a while, so free flowing discussions were not a feature of that early incarnation. After learning about a service that allowed mailing lists to be easily hosted online I signed us up and added everyone already on the locally hosted version. We were on our way!









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