It’s Tuesday which means it’s time for Crossroads Comics!

This past week hasn’t been the best week for me. Work has been stressful, a close friend passed away suddenly this past Friday, and I spent most of last Tuesday worrying about my friends and former co-workers’ safety in DC, amongst other things. All in all, it hasn’t been great, and today especially was rather stressful with work, a job interview, and the funeral of the aforementioned friend all being today, hence why this is rather late. So I decided to do something a little different his week, and instead of doing my usual comic spotlight and analysis, I’m going to turn the spotlight on a whole platform instead, ComicFury.
ComicFury, for those unfamiliar, is a webcomic hosting platform that has been around for roughly twelve years now. Up until recently, it primarily hosted original comics and was not the most well known when competing against its titan competitors like Smackjeeves or Tapas. However, winter of 2019 changed that.
In December of 2019, Smackjeeves gave the site a complete makeover and announced massive changes to the overall site with little warning to its users, causing many of the users that had previously called the place home to abandon it. The new update streamlined the site to make it more like Tapas and Webtoon, but in the process stripped it of many of the features that drew its primary userbase to it in the first place. Thus, left without a site to call home, these users began to look elsewhere to find another site that could offer something similar to what Smackjeeves once was.
Enter the hero of our story, ComicFury, or more specifically, the site’s amazing admin, Kyo. Quickly, many of the former Smackjeeves users found ComicFury and were delighted to see that the site offered much of the same items that had drawn people to Smackjeeves originally, including website customization, custom domains, a fairly active forum, and more. Soon, one comic after another was jumping ship from Smackjeeves and flooding ComicFury. This unexpected surge of new users, jokingly called “Refujeeves”, essentially hit the site overnight, causing some server issues that Kyo was quick to handle as more and more people came through the doors of the site. Kyo also then put out a theme converter that would allow former Smackjeeves users to convert the templates they had use on Smackjeeves into ones that were compatible with ComicFury’s coding system, allowing them create an exact replica of what their site once looked like on Smackjeeves. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of what all Kyo has done to continue to improve the site.
Kyo is by far one of the most active site admins I’ve ever seen and his willingness to take criticism about the site in order to improve it is amazing. From creating new site categories to new layout changes and features, Kyo has done so much for his ever expanding user base in order to accommodate both old and new members of the community. It has really helped to ease some of the friction that this sudden transition has caused and overall is something that is very much worthy of every ounce of praise that we can give it.
This brings us to an announcement that went live yesterday. At about 1 PM EST yesterday, Kyo released an announcement titled ComicFury Needs Your Help. In it, he explains how the site needs to move to a new server soon, and while currently he has the funds to manage the cost of hosting the site at no charge to the members of the site, in the future this may not be the case. He explains that while in the past twelve years, featuring ads on the site has not been something he has ever wanted to do, it may become necessary in the future in order to earn enough revenue in order to support the new server. However, Kyo is looking to avoid this since he feels strongly about things like Google Ads as well as ads in general, and wants to find a solution that doesn’t resort to them. And in the event that ads are necessary, he has a plan that will hopefully allow him to avoid running Google Ads on the site, instead thinking of ads for the comics on the site instead.
All of this is to say that Kyo has put out a request for more support on the ComicFury Patreon. All of this money goes towards the site’s upkeep and helps Kyo keep the site ad free for all its users to enjoy. And that’s why I wanted to promote ComicFury’s Patreon today. Kyo’s efforts are something that deserve to be recognized and rewarded. Without them, many webcomic creators and readers may have been out of options when it came to a new site to call home after the fall of Smackjeeves. Yet, when they were faced with nowhere else to turn, Kyo welcomed the new users with open arms and did his best to make them feel truly welcome.
So please consider donating to ComicFury’s Patreon. The announcement Kyo put out yesterday has already worked a lot of magic, increasing the revenue the site was earning by roughly $400, but it’s entirely possible that many people like myself won’t be able to stay patrons for the long term. Thus, while it may seem like the Patreon is earning a lot of money right now, be sure to keep in mind that it may not sustain this and thus you shouldn’t hesitate to give if you can.
Be sure to check out the rest of the comics in this week’s lineup and until next time, see ya!
Crossroads Comics
Gible Bites Prin redemption arc confirmed?
PMD: Chanterelle This is such an intense battle!
PMD: Rangers of Sky There’s definitely more going on here than we know about.
PMD: Wildfire What a beautiful cover!
Pokémon Rising Shadows Oh hello Echo.
Pokémon: Shadow of the Sun Uh oh! An onix-pected obstacle!
Pokémon X Adventures Democracy at its finest.
Renegade’s Redemption Uh oh, this doesn’t look good.
Shinka: The Last Eevee This looks really bad…
The Shaymin Café What a cute winter compilation!
ComicFury Comics
Dear Sergio Hahaha classic new trainer battle.
Mahiwaga Oooh look at all this cool worldbuilding!
PMD: Adventures In Viraska Is it down and out?
PMD: Broken Code Will the advice work?
PMD: Midnight Star Looks like she’s staying!
PM: Tangled I wonder if they’ve all lost their memories or if they have theirs.
The Caretaker Burn baby burn!!!
The Long Way What a heartwarming first update of the year!
Deviantart Comics
Explorers of Shadows They’re back up? But how?
Making Matcha New team member got!
Milos from Home Why not both?
Pokémon Explorers Comic Falcon PAWNCH!!
PMD: Hanging in the Balance What a heart felt reunion! That’s so cute.
PMD: Turncoats I really don’t like where this is going.
The Brains and the Brawn He made it! And just in the nick of time!
When Little Emma Ran Away The plot thickens!
Off-site Comics
Ask the Potion Brewers Why do I hear that one song from the Little Mermaid?
Ask Time Wonders Away they go!
Flake and Rudy Seems Rudy isn’t so optimistic about this.
Floating On Seems no one can do things for themselves anymore.
Genesis: A Gijinka Story Somewhere safe hopefully.
MS-Paint Furret Seems that command didn’t work very well.
Neverland Faerai Don’t think that was how that is supposed to go.
Steven Universe: Switcheroo AU That’s such a cool design!!
The post Crossroads Comics #132-ComicFury Needs Your Help appeared first on Pokémon Crossroads.


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