The Wizard's Lair is the DOWNFALL of the Superheroine in Distress Genre!

Seems of late I have been reading quite a bit about the failure of some pay sites within the community are closing down. Some are putting the blame on peer-to-peer sites in general, while others are placing the blame on The Wizard’s Lair in particular.

Now, without knowing the financial specifics of each and every website that is closing down and/or losing money, how can anyone place any blame on any one thing in particular, or even accuse a single website, it’s webmaster, and it’s contributors for contributing to the financial decline of these sites? When I look around, I see that everyone is feeling the financial pinch, influenced largely by the (ever) rising cost of fuel, which has a cascading effect on everything from car sales, to food costs. People all over are doing everything that they can to save money, from driving less, to canceling vacations, and to eliminating discretionary expenses, of which would include memberships to websites. Is anyone looking at pointing to oil speculators as the possible culprit of causing the reduction in profit to these pay sites? No, of course not. It is easier to point a finger at me, and people like me, and call us thieves.

This really is a matter of apples and oranges, in my book. While I agree that many images that I use (and I state “I” in that the buck stops with me when it comes to The Wizard’s Lair, regardless of where the images came from originally) come from many different sources, including from pay sites, the images that I use come from third party sources. That is to say, I pay a fee to access newsgroups from Valkyrie, from which I get most of my material. There are HUNDREDS of these newsgroups, where people upload THOUSANDS of images from many many sources, on a daily basis, most of which are not attributed. Many of images have gone through multiple “hands”, and in the meantime have been renamed and/or cropped and/or otherwise modified. To accuse artists that contribute to The Lair of such removing of copyright markers from original images, without knowing such for fact, is purposefully inflammatory and insulting, especially when it is only my web site that is so accused as an example of such 'evils'. I will never assume such things, nor accuse others of such things, without having some good references and facts to back me up. The web is much too large a place, and there are far too many resources out there, where images can be found, from free sites such as Yahoo groups and Flickr accounts, from newsgroups and pay sites such as Talon’s Eyrie, to those various peer-to-peer websites where one can download huge amounts of material, to simply state that any one person is responsible for the decline and/or closure of any one website.

What I see affecting these websites is not that sites like the Lair or Heromorph (to just use 2 popular and well known sites as examples) use images from other websites as base materials for photomanipulations, but that we have more and more companies jumping on the superheroine bandwagon, starting up subscription sites, and expecting the same amount of people, with the same amount of monies, to sponsor and sustain a growing amount of services. That is the same logic of having 10 coffee shops on one block and expecting the same amount of pedestrians to pass by them all and continue to buy multiple cups of coffee from each and every coffee shop. That is not going to happen, and it is ridiculous to think so. At best, each customer will frequent a few favorite coffee stands per day (say one for breakfast, one for lunch and one for dinner), which means that most will still be losing money. Or, what will most probably happen is that each customer will alternate between each shop, testing from each stall one after the other. Again, most of the shops will lose money, since there are only enough people on that block to truly support two of the shops. Does it make any sense for those other shops to accuse the lady that runs the free coffee stand across the street for causing the shops from losing money and having to close down? Not at all. But yet, that is what is happening right now where The Lair is being accused of causing the economic death of various websites.

Way back in the day, when I first became involved in this community, there were a handful of free sites devoted to the genre, and one pay site (that I was/am aware of, there may of been others out there, but I really really searched!) That pay site, Sooperhero.com, is still in business. That was it!! The only free site that was created those many years ago, and that is still currently active, that I know of, is The Wizard’s Lair. This was before the time of SHC and MrX (though not by much, a year or so), and certainly before the time of the vast popularity of Yahoo Groups and the like. There was no such thing as 3D poser at that time. It was hand drawn or photomanips. The Lair started out pretty humbly and small, but has grown over the years, with some 2D art, and mostly photomanipulations, just like anyone else who created a website devoted to the genre (which all eventually went the way of 404 or to a point of utter stagnation). In the almost 12 years that I have ran that website, I have had exactly TWO people write me to ask me to remove AN image each. Two images out of how many hundreds? And neither one of the two webmasters were anything but polite and professional in their communication with me (one being Cory Thompson, RIP), unlike the people that have been currently doing their best to insult myself and Scarlet Witch in public forums.

I remember when I was being thanked for giving people an outlet for their fantasies. Thanked for giving the artists a place to put their material that they could not find elsewhere. Thanked for letting people know that they were not alone in their fantasies, that there were others, just like them, that enjoyed the genre of superheroines in distress. Slowly, the community grew, as the internet grew. More people came online and started to share their love of various arts and subjects, from cars to models, from Star Wars and Star Trek to message boards about things about complaints about MS to guides on Zelda. More and more people started to create websites devoted to their favorite things, some of these being websites devoted to superheroines. AOL, and Yahoo came into being, and social networks started to grow and flourish, from chat rooms to message groups. And, as time went on and technology grew, methods to share files became easier and easier to utilize. Then came cable and broadband, and with them peer-to-peer groups where large files could be shared with each other in less and less time, everything from songs to movies, image files and zip folders. Through out all this The Lair plugged along, never charging a penny for anything, indeed spending money to encourage writers to create stories about our favorite genre, for the enjoyment of all.

And yet, I am the bad guy here. We will not say anything about the overall pirating nature that such sites as Napster and it's ilk that went to create and profit from such uploading and downloading and sharing of content. Or from the multitude of groups that are created using material from everyone else’s sites, including my own (and if it makes you all feel better, let us talk only about the 2D and 3D images that were created soley by myself and/or Raven and/or Scarlet Witch, for examples). I am now told that I, and my contributors, should have to spend more money, and to hire models to pose for such images (and thus get me smack down into the middle of 2257 which caused me to take out a HUGE chunk of past material from my website), thus throw away any sort of privacy that I may still retain at this time. Or, to spend hours and hours of time that I do not have to contact each and every adult website out there that manufactures images and ask them for special images and special permissions, or to contact my host, and ask him to supply me and my artists with images from his paysite. In essence, stating that The Lair become a pay site ourselves, because that is what would have to happen if I were to leave my RL job, to spend all the hours online to do all these things. I would have to pay my bills some way, and since I would be spending money by turning The Lair into something that it is not, I would have to start charging my visitors, as well. Thus, breaking my promise that The Wizard’s Lair would always be free, and removing the one last website of it’s type from the internet for the edification and encouragement and education and entertainment of those folks that are new to the community, and/or curious about the genre, and/or cannot afford to pay their monies to websites, and/or do not have the credit card needed to join said memberships. There would no longer be a website of it's type ever again, because we must all become cookie cutter copies of each other, to use the same methods and means as everyone else. To drown you all in the mediocrity of sameness, just for the sake of the profit margin of a few individuals, who would rather accuse someone else for their own problems, then to take any credit for their own difficulties.

I am not saying that I am a saint, or that this is a perfect community, or that the internet is a great economical model to follow. Indeed, I know next to nothing about finances, and business. But, I do know that you cannot exist for long in an economical model with finite customers with finite resources with creating more and more businesses. You can cut up a pie into only so many pieces before the pie falls apart. Why should I, or anyone else, pay 20, 40, 50, or 100 dollars to keep all these companies going from month to month, when it makes more sense for me to pay 20 dollars to a site, go in and download as much as possible for that 30 days, and then cancel my membership, and then put the next 20 dollars to another site, and repeat? I will bet anyone that most customers of these websites are doing exactly that. Are we going to start criticizing these people for making their few hard earned dollars stretch the furthest in this manner? I am not, because I am not, nor have I ever been, in this community to make a buck off my fellow lovers of this genre. I am here because I love the genre, and have always wanted to GIVE to the community, to SHARE with others my love for this genre. The people in this community that love the genre for it's own sake are those that I respect and wish to provide as much free entertainment as possible to. Those that are here only to make a buck off of you all, that are here not for the love of the genre, but for the love of the dollar, are those that will do their best to tear down the people that do, in their own little imperfect way, the best that they can do, with the resourses and time and energies that they have to them. While I would like to thank everyone for supporting the genre, these people would rather berate the artists of the community for their own works and efforts, by lumping everyone that is not them into one broad stroke of the cyber-pen in their forums.

So now, I am being accused of bringing about the downfall of the community. This community that I love so much. This community that I have spent years of doing all that I could to encourage the writers and artists to share with others freely. Now, I am accused of creating stress and discontentment among these artists of the genre, of creating an atmosphere where these artists hang up their pens (real or graphical), and retiring from the community because of The Wizard's Lair and my actions (or inactions), and thus removing more and more material from the fans.

I find that far fetched, in that I believe that I have done more then most any other individual in this community in regards to the growth of this genre on the internet. Would these people even have the guts to ask their girlfriends to dress up like a superheroine and to let them take pictures of them in such outfits if they did not already know that there were tons of folks out there, just like them, just like me, or just like you? How many people felt better about themselves and their fantasies when you found such sites as The Wizard’s Lair, or The Chainman’s Institute, or Super Heroine Central? How many people were thankful to the artists like Raven, or Scarlet Witch, or Mr X, or Coldblood, or Black Alchemy, or even The Scribbler for putting their fantasies onto (digital) paper and letting us know that we were not the only one’s that thought that such fantasies were not only sexy and erotic, but also acceptable, and acceptable to a large amount of people? Did you really care that art was 2D or 3D or a photomanipulation, as long as it was good and was something that you enjoyed and turned you on?

How many of these pay sites, would be here, if not for the spirit and ideas and acts of those online pioneers, like Mike at Supergirl.net, who gave me my own start almost 14 (15??) years ago, with a place to put up my own crappy art to share with you all? Would people spend money to subscribe to pay sites that they knew nothing about, unless they knew that these artists have already been around a while, such as Brieros? How much of the economic impact on a company has more to do with a person’s college class schedule (that is graduating and moving on and thus away from that computer), then with whether or not someone removed the copyright notation on a handful of images? These questions are too hard to answer with any certainty, because business economics is much too complex, with each company under different conditions then the next company. But, that doesn’t stop some from saying that The Wizard’s Lair is responsible for the closing down of websites that deal primarily with poser material that is uploaded to peer-to-peer sites of which I have no responsibility for. Is that fair to me, Scarlet Witch, or our contributors? Of course not, but yet, I, and the Lair, is being very viciously attacked of late for not doing things exactly like a few people would like us to do. These people, who do not put out even 1/2 of 1% of what the Lair puts out, wants the Lair to either change, and thus become like everyone else (thus a pay site), or to close down completely (not specifically stated, but definitely meant when one reads between the lines).

So, let us all think of these things the next time we start to download a song from online, or start to cut and paste something from a blog, or make a DVD copy of our buddies movie, or a CD copy of our cousins video game. Let that person that has ever copied down from information found in a library book into a report without a footnote remember these words. Let that person that has paid for everything that they have, from when they were a child to this time now, and that has downloaded not one image from a cheerleader website or scanned any image from a comic book to post onto a blog be the first one to call me a thief of someone else’s intellectual and creative properties, who is only out for their own profit (and please tell me where I profit!!) Let that person who has lost their business and their livelihood because of what I personally did contact me and state that I alone was responsible, and how I was personally responsible (and have the facts to back them up) and not a state of recession that exists, or because of a large amount of people laid off in their neighborhoods, or because they got a girlfriend or wife (or husband or boyfriend) who they live with that does not share their interests who made them close their accounts or .. or .. or... (you get the drift). Maybe then I will close down The Lair like it seems like some people want me to do. But until that time, I will continue to engage in the activities that I have, in the manner that I do now, while doing my most to encourage my artists, and others, to contribute their time and talents to the betterment of the community at large, and the enjoyment of all.

(Originally posted July 5th, 2008 on Yahoo 360)