A native of
Prince Edward Island, Canada, Don MacPherson first began writing his "Critiques on Infinite Earths" comics reviews in his spare time in 1995, posting them regularly to Usenet.
Don was lured south of the border in 1999 to write about comics for a website company in Manhattan. In 2000, fate (and a lack of venture capital) brought him back to his hometown of Charlottetown, and from there, he freelanced for the California-based Fandom Inc.'s Comics Newsarama domain.
Now he's back to writing about comics in his spare time again, this time with Randy Lander for their own site, The Fourth Rail. Don is currently working as a staff reporter for The Daily Gleaner, a daily newspaper serving the capital city region in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
He can be reached at don@thefourthrail.com.
Randy Lander
Austin,
Texas resident Randy Lander has been reviewing comic books in his weekly "Snap Judgments" column since 1996. His reviews have been featured on Usenet, Snapjudgments.com, Comic Book Resources, Newsarama, Psycomic, The Comic Reader and a variety of other comics-related Internet sites and print outlets. Randy and Don were the editorial team for Psycomic, a New York based start-up, in 1999, and were the staff reviewers at Comics Newsarama during their time with Fandom.com.
Randy's day job is being part of the management of Dragon's Lair, a three-store chain of comic shops in central Texas. He lives in Austin with his wife Suzanne and his daughter Katy. Those who are curious (although God knows why) about Randy's life outside of The Fourth Rail can check out his blog, Inside Joke Theatre.
He can be reached at randy@thefourthrail.com, as a variety of spammers all over the Internet clearly know.
SUBMISSIONS AND ADVERTISING
Q: Do you guys accept comics for review? Where can a creator or publisher send comp or preview copies for review?
A: For privacy reasons, we prefer not to list our home addresses on the website. However, we'll be happy to email our mailing addresses to interested creators or publishers, all you have to do is DROP US AN EMAIL. At this point, Randy is reviewing infrequently, and is not accepting comp copies, but Don is open to more review material. If you can, please provide a solicitation date and release date for the material, so we know what sort of time frame we're working on as well.
Due to the volume of material we receive these days, not to mention increasingly crowded schedules, it may take some time for your material to show up in the review rotation. Unfortunately, we can no longer absolutely guarantee that everything sent to us will be reviewed, as we did for many years, but we will always do our best to review material that is sent to us. And while dropping a line to make sure we got the material is perfectly fine, repeated emails about when you might see the review will not speed the process any. Please also note that for time reasons, we generally do not review books which are mostly prose or even illustrated prose. We will sometimes make exceptions, but prose books take a great deal more time to read and review, and free time is something that neither of us has a lot of.
Q: Do you guys get all your comics for free?
A: Nope, 'fraid not. We get Marvel and DC First Looks/Sneak Peeks (which do not compose the entire DC/Marvel line-up, but only a small chunk of it) in our hands thanks to the generosity of our retailers. We do get some comps, which are much appreciated and which make our job a lot easier (in that it gives us a wide spectrum of material to review) and a little harder (in that we are both constantly swamped with material we need to review.)
Q: Do you guys review webcomics? What about comics that are done but don't have a publisher yet?
A: We both enjoy the occasional webcomic, but because there are so many webcomics out there, we've had to draw a line somewhere to be able to have time to review, and that line is unfortunately that we must have a printed comic (or black and white preview copy, at least) to review that has been solicited or is going to be solicited through a major distributor. Reviewing webcomics requires more of a breadth of knowledge than we have in that field, and looking at books before they are ready to publish and reviewing them is more the job of creators, editors and marketing than critics.
Q: How do I know if my comic-book project fits your criteria for review?
A: Start from the guidelines above. If you're still not sure, drop us a line. An e-mail link can be found at the bottom of this FAQ.
Q: Does this site take advertising?
A: You betcha. We're not set up for banner ads at the moment, but we would be willing to look into it for interested parties. We're also quite interested in sponsorships or running ads on the front page to help defray our hosting costs and recoup some of the lost work/leisure time we put into writing the content for the site. If you're interested in advertising, we'd love to hear from you and you can drop us a line HERE.
Q: Do you accept submissions for the website?
A: The short answer: Not really.
The long answer... Obviously, we're not really looking for new reviews. We cover a lot of stuff, and we think we've got all the reviews we need at the moment. However, we're always looking for guest commentaries from industry pros and noted members of the fandom community as well.
FOURTH RAIL BASICS
Q: Why "the Fourth Rail"?
A: Because the Third Rail was taken. Seriously. The Third Rail -- referring to the electrified rail in a subway system -- was an idea we both liked, but the URL, in various permutations, was taken. So we moved to The Fourth Rail.
We find it's a memorable phrase that conveys a lot of meaning. First of all, this is our fourth comics website. But beyond that, we find the term communicates a sense of energy and direction. Finally, while we love comics, we also want to see better comics, and
we often "rail" on about it.
Q: Why does Randy call his reviews "Snap Judgments"?
A: When he first started out, Randy's reviews were largely just quick assessments made on the spur of the moment, intended more as discussion starters than any sort of serious review, and so "Snap Judgments" seemed to fit. You'll note that it sometimes shows up as "Judgments" and sometimes as "Judgements." Randy prefers "Judgments," but either one is technically correct.
Q: Why does Don call his reviews "Critiques on Infinite Earths"?
A: Those reading comics for a long time like Don will pick up on the reference quickly. One of Don's favorite comics series has always been DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. Don figured that since his reviews are of stories set in a myriad of different worlds, "Critiques on Infinite Earths" worked pretty well. He probably wasn't right, but he's been using it so long now that he's stuck with it.
Q: What happened to Headlines?
A: Headlines, our news section, was Don MacPherson's baby, but with his full-time reporting job, part-time reviewing for The Fourth Rail and other personal time commitments, Headlines had to be put on hiatus.
However, there are plenty of websites out there that specialize in up-to-date comics news. We highly recommend Comics Newsarama, The Pulse and Comic Book Resources.
Q: What happened to Randy's reviews?
A: Randy has decided to go into semi-retirement from comic reviewing, offering reviews on a sporadic basis rather than a weekly one. You can read the entire column relating to this retirement HERE.
Q: Is this a full-time job for you?
A: Both of us have reviewed full-time, for almost two years (first at Psycomic, then at Comics Newsarama), but with the Internet economy the way it is, it's not a paying gig anymore. Don works as a staff reporter for The Daily Gleaner in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, and Randy works at a comic shop in Austin, Texas called Dragon's Lair. This does mean that we will sometimes have real-life difficulties that interrupt our regular production schedule, but we will try to keep those interruptions to a minimum.
QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR REVIEWS
Q: Will the plot be spoiled for me if I read your reviews?
A: We're readers as well as reviewers, and we know how annoying it is to have the best surprises spoiled for you in a comic, movie, book or whatever else is being reviewed. We will always endeavor to avoid spoilers where possible, and in 99 percent of the cases, we'll avoid all of the major ones. You won't read one of our reviews that tells you that Rosebud is the sled unless it's absolutely impossible to review the comic fairly without blowing the surprise(s). (And for any of you who haven't seen Citizen Kane... oops!)
In addition, we both use a format which tends to avoid spoilers in the first paragraph and gives a sort of "overview" of where the review is going. While reading that paragraph may not always suffice, if you're fanatical about avoiding even the tiniest hints of
where the story of the issue is going, you may want to hold off on the rest of the review until you've read the book or determined that you're not going to check it out.
Q: Why do you guys review X but not Y? Y is a better comic, with more mainstream potential!
A: We get a lot of e-mail like this, wondering why we don't review a particular title, or why we don't "skip a month" of, say, 100 Bullets to review something new. Fact of the matter is that we are getting these copies from three places: First Look books (Marvel and DC only, pretty much), comp copies (from publishers) and out of our own pocket. The latter is a significant source of our reviews, and so we're naturally going to pay for things that tend to be more to our tastes. We both like to take chances and find new stuff, but we also know what we like and what we'd like to recommend to our readers. Sometimes, when a title is generating enough advance interest (positive or negative), we'll even pick up a copy for review, even if we suspect it's not our cup o' tea. But when it comes right down to it, we can't afford to go into debt just for a little more breadth of reviewing.
Q: What does "This comic book was not among this week's new releases" mean?
A: We receive a fair amount of material for review after or before its official release date. This indicator is tagged onto reviews of material that didn't hit the majority of comic book shelves that week so that readers will know to seek it out in the back issues or ask their retailer about it, rather than being frustrated when they can't find it on the new shelf. It also means that the book is not eligible for Best of the Week status, since it isn't technically part of that reviewing week.
Q: Hey, that reminds me. What exactly does "Best of the Week" mean?
A: Best of the Week is a qualifier Don gives to the favorite comic that he read each week. While we read a lot, we don't read everything, so Best of the Week shouldn't be read as an indication of objective truth, but simply an indication of what we liked best that week out of the books that we read.
QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR SITE
Q: Your website looks great. Do you guys design sites too?
A: Nope. Our design is the brainchild of James Lucas Jones, webmaster and senior editor with Oni Press. We think he's done an amazing job.
Q: Your site is kind of hard to read, with black letters on dark backgrounds. What's up with that?
A: While we try to make Fourth Rail accessible to everyone using anything from Lynx on up, there are certain features that require a newer browser to fully function. In particular, the font colors and some other elements are set using style sheets, which is not supported in all versions of all browsers. We have done our best to hand-code reviews with font color tags so that anyone can read them, even if the style sheets aren't functioning, but the site looks best on newer versions of Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Q: I haven't been able to access the site in some time. Is it down?
A: As with everyone else on the Internet, we do occasionally have downtime or difficulties, but The Fourth Rail is generally up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have had occasional complaints at folks being unable to reach us in parts of the world like Malaysia or China, and it usually winds up being something regional on their end. It never hurts to let us know, but in general, extended downtime is probably on your end, not ours. And unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it, although we will of course let our hosting company know what's going on.
