Seanbaby, again
Seanbaby has starting updating again. If you’re unfamiliar, that’s the site of comic genius Sean Riley, who used to update his site three times a week with these huge, dense, 2,000-word articles, each of which contained more comedy than entire seasons of some network TV comedy shows. These were not rambling entries about his pets and something funny he saw on the way to work. These were polished, formatted, precise pieces of comedy, turned out in volumes that boggle my mind. He was the most prolific comedy machine I had ever seen or heard tale of and as a result, his archives are so vast it’s difficult to know where to start.
I would recommend his Kick to the Groin comics, dialogue and story added to a horrifying women’s self-defense manual that was apparently based entirely on crushing the testicles anyone who stood in their way. His 20 Worst NES Games is probably the article I’ve seen linked the most often. But I’m telling you, if you’ve never seen it before you can spend weeks there.
Seanbaby.com became big right around the time I was starting this site (1999-2000) so he was always sort of an inspiration to me. He’s written for magazines and turned up on MTV and G4 specials about video games and has in general supported himself with his writing in a way that I’ve never been able to. So I’ve always hated him for that.
But in my calmer moments I remember that Seanbaby got huge in an era before videos and articles could go “viral” and collect half a million hits in two hours. You didn’t have that hyper-efficient network of blogs and link dumps that you have now. No, Seanbaby was just purely relentless about turning out gigantic volumes of entertainment and gathered his audience bit by bit, loyal fan by loyal fan. You came back because you were always rewarded for going there, you were always entertained, you were never bombarded with ads like the one above. I don’t know how he did it. And apparently he’s doing it again.
