As you probably heard already, AOL shut down ComicsAlliance last week after three years and three Eisner Award nominations. This is pretty upsetting for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I’m currently out of a full-time job.

More than that, though, CA was a dream job in a lot of ways. I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was 12, and CA was literally the place that made that happen, allowing me to quit my day job and focus on making jokes about Batman on a professional level. There were so many opportunities that I got because of that job, and so many friends. That’s the thing about CA, and one of the reasons I think it worked so well: We all really got along, which made it fun to argue with each other and easy to write things that were meant to entertain ourselves more than anyone else. Working with Laura, Joe, Caleb and Andy gave me a pretty incredible amount of freedom to write about things I wanted to write about, and as selfish as it is, losing that is pretty depressing — something that’s been slightly exaggerated by the fact that most reactions are almost treating me like I am actually dead, instead of just sitting at home replaying Fable II  and hustling for more work. But on the bright side, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve gotten a lot of support from friends and readers, and it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are going to miss CA as much as I will. Or, you know, as much as you can without it directly impacting your wallet.

As for what’s next, I’m really not sure. This kind of took us all by surprise, and I have no idea how long ComicsAlliance.com is going to stay up or if they’re going to keep my work available there. War Rocket Ajax is Matt’s and mine, so that’ll continue into the forseeable future (and hey, now might be a good time to visit our sponsors). I’ve got a few unannounced projects that’ll be revealed soon, so I’ll obviously be talking about them here, on Twitter and on Tumblr, and I’ve got that semi-regular gig writing jokes about ’90s technology in movies at Wired, but I still don’t know where I’ll land permanently, if anywhere. I’ve seen  a lot of people mention that I could just keep on writing here, but that’s not really that workable considering that writing here doesn’t make a whole lot of money. A very, very kind reader did throw a donation my way to keep the ISB up and running, though, so there’s that. But, you know, hopefully it’ll all work out.

For now, I’m still just kind of shocked about CA getting axed, so forgive me if this got a little rambly. We’ll see what happens!