Monitor Duty #2.1 - "Welcome Back, My Friends" By Randy Lander Welcome to The Fourth Rail. This is the latest iteration of the work that Don and I have been doing together for about five or six years now. And while we expect to have other features, including guest columns by friends in the industry and maybe even the occasional news and interviews, for the most part, this is the place to come to read comic book reviews. Snap Judgments and Critiques on Infinite Earths, to be precise. So why the Fourth Rail? Why not snapjudgments.com or critiques.com? Well, there are several reasons. First and foremost, we thought it sounded cool, and given that we went back and forth over a variety of names, only to find many of them already registered by other companies or to find that one or both of us absolutely hated the name upon further consideration, getting a consensus that The Fourth Rail was a cool name was just short of a miracle. At any rate, the name spun out of Don's suggestion of "The Third Rail," which we both loved but was taken by any number of companies on the web already. Since this is our fourth incarnation of reviews (Snapjudgments.com/CBR, Psycomic, Comics Newsarama) and since The Sixty-Third Rail would have just seemed silly, we moved up the spectrum a notch to become The Fourth Rail. From there, it was on to the design phase, and we were lucky that James Lucas Jones was available to design the site for us. James has designed, among other things, the Oni Press website and Andi Watson's official site, and as you can see from our site, he's incredibly talented. I know I speak for Don as well when I say I can't thank James enough for all the help he gave us in setting the site up. Once Don and I saw the design, we got even more fired up to get back to reviewing. James is a big part of the reason we're back in style, and you might drop him a line and tell him what a great job he did on the design. It's traditional these days when launching a site to have a mission statement. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a new comics website these days, so a little focus is necessary to stand out from the crowd. Savant, The Ninth Art , PopImage, Sequential Tart , CBR, Comics Newsarama (all excellent sites, by the way) and many others all have a focus and a goal, and while there's some overlap between most comics sites, you can generally go to each one expecting something a little different. So what do you expect when you come here? Reviews. I'm not going to lie to you, that's what we're good at and that's what we'll keep doing. In particular, weekly reviews of mainstream comics. You'll definitely see everyone from Fantagraphics to Slave Labor to various self-publishers reviewed here, but the meat and potatoes of the site will be reviews of regular weekly books from Marvel, DC and Oni Press. Not just because that's what we like to read, but because those are the books we have the best access to without breaking our bank accounts, and because they come out on a regular basis. We'll review just about anything that crosses our hot little hands, but neither of us can afford to go into hock to keep reviewing. However, while the focus will be on the weekly books, both Don and I are fans of the graphic novel format, regardless of what trendy word is describing it this week, and so you'll be seeing reviews of graphic novels here as well. A day hasn't gone by in the past year or so that I didn't have a stack of graphic novels sitting at my night table and beside my office desk waiting to be read, enjoyed and reviewed, and I don't think a day will come soon when that night table or desk sits empty. My own mission statement, the reason I'm here, is to try and make sure that the books I like get into the hands of other readers who might like them. Every so often, it's my job to warn people off a book I don't like, but in general, the part of the job I enjoy and the part I see as important is recommending good books and explaining just why they're worth your time. Why is Don here? Well, I told him that if he wrote enough reviews, he'd get chicks and free beer. Nobody let him in on the truth, OK? Randy Lander is a comic-book reviewer based in Austin, Texas and half of the editorial team for The Fourth Rail.