The History of "THANOS - The Mad Titan"
I started playing around with website design and coding way back in the summer of 1995. My first website was, typically enough, a godawful affair. It was basically a long page that told people who I was, and had some info, links, and pictures of some of the things I was interested in. I began by coding everything by hand, and learned by looking at the HTML codes from other sites. The site was ugly and very basic, but then most first efforts (especially back then) are pretty raw.
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Main page, circa 1997. Click here to take a look. Please note, old main-page links will not work.
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But, we learn by doing, and I eventually learned my way around basic HTML coding, and also eventually learned to avoid annoying things like blinky text, and backgrounds that were hard on the eye. Eventually I decided to split my interests off into sites of their own, and around a year later I had several websites, each dedicated to a particular fannish interest. Included in the first batch of dedicated websites were ones for Doctor WHO, The Crow, The Transformers, and also my personal page, and a page dedicated to displaying my artwork. Later on I would branch out still further, creating pages for comics, horror films, and a small Star Trek links site.
While I had long been a somewhat casual fan of Thanos, it was the start of what was then the biggest cross-company crossover event in the history of comics that made me the rather hardcore fan I am today. The first issue of "DC vs MARVEL" hit the stands in 1996, and proved to be something of a hit. The "Amalgam Universe" titles that resulted as part of the plot of the 4-issue miniseries, however, were even more successful than the initial crossover itself.
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Main page, circa 1998. Click here to take a look. Please note, old main-page links will not work.
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While not one of the feature bouts, one of the fights that took place because of the crossover was a matchup between Thanos and Darkseid, the character our favorite Titan was initially based off of. And while there was no resolution to this battle, it did spawn a lot of talk. Plus, it revived my interest in a chartacter that Marvel had allowed to go fallow for several years. Because of this, I started to purchase back issues of Thanos appearances I had initially missed, like the "Blood and Thunder" storyline that had appeared a few years prior in the pages of "Warlock and the Infinity Watch".
As a result of this newfound interest, I decided to make my interest known online, and the first version of a Thanos page arrived in mid-1997. Titled "Randy's Thanos Page", it was a simple, one-page gallery of scans from various Thanos appearances. However, I soon began to expand it into a true website in order to make it a better source of information instead of letting it stand as a mere pictorial homage to the character. And so, as Thanos became the key adversary in Mark Waid's monthly "Ka-Zar" title, the site grew in leaps and bounds, as I added in a Thanos bio, links to related websites, and also a history of the charcter as well.
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Main page, circa 1999. Click here to take a look. Please note, old main-page links will not work.
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By late 1997, the site had grown beyond its humble beginings to become a fully-fledged resource for those interested in Thanos. And with this growth had come a new name for the site itself, and thus "Thanos - The Mad Titan" had truly arrived. This was never more clear to me when I was approached in June, 2001 by Jennifer Moore of the Marvel New Media Program. Soon after, my site became an official Marvel Fan-Site.
Problems came in early 2002, however, when Tripod began to curtail the options, storage space, and bandwidth available to its free and low-end paid subscribers. This situation was not unique, as many hosts started to greatly reduce their free services in order to focus on their more lucrative paid subscription services, and for a while free webpages seemed to be in real danger of going the way of the dodo. I initially attempted to allieviate this situation by reducing the sizes of the images and graphics I used, but this failed to cease the regular shutdowns my site experienced due to bandwidth limits. Thus, leaving the site at Tripod was soon out of the question.
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Main page, circa 2000. Click here to take a look. Please note, old main-page links will not work.
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So, I was forced to find a new home for it. I found one rather quickly via crowfans.com, who had so kindly hosted my Crow site "A Dead Man Visits You" for several years. I continued to expand the site at its new spot on the web, adding more events to the history section, new profiles, a merchandise section and more. I also started my Thanos Thralls yahoo group at this time, and the group eventually grew to the point where it is today, boasting over 200 members. However, the site's time at crowfans would also pass in the autumn of 2004 as the server went down several times before finally going down for good. I soon discovered that the maintainers no longer had time for the host any longer, and again I was forced to move "Thanos - The Mad Titan" to a new home. I found a great server here at Quality Host Online, where the site now dwells.
And so, 8 years after "Randy's Thanos Page" first went online, here we are today. A lot of things have changed (such as my layout skills), while much remains the same (I still code all my HTML by hand). I have a lot of great things planned for the site this year, such as new additions to the history section, a greatly expanded and improved appearances list, more image galleries, and much, much more. So, I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed this site over the years, and I hope you find something new with each visit.
Happy Browsing!
Randall "CORVUS" Lilly
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