Today marks the 17th anniversary of your friendly neighborhood Crawlspace. Please post in the comment section how long you’ve been visiting and how you discovered it. It’d also be fun for you to post your favorite thing about the site.
Here’s some fun facts about the site over the years.
*Back on August 8, 1998 I was surfing the web and came across geocities offering free webhosting and the ability to make your own website.
*After learning to hand code html I created the Spider-Man Crawlspace. I got the name Crawlspace from the letter page of the adjetiveless Spider-Man letter column, I always thought it sounded cool and it had a McFarlane graphic.
*Before I bought the .com address the Spider-Man Crawlspace was actually located at this easy to type address.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Vault/7930/
*If you’d like to see what the Crawlspace looked like since 2000. Click on this link.
*The very first celebrity to visit the website was writer and editor Keith R.A. Decandido. He complimented me on all my reviews of the Marvel prose novels that came out in the late 1990s.
*The first celebrity to ever post on our message board was writer Peter David. He logged on after I asked him to answer a fan’s Hulk question.
*The Crawlspace was mentioned in Entertainment Weekly in 2002.
*USA Today online named us the hot website in 2002.
*The podcast began in 2006 and is the longest running Spider-Man podcast online.
*This is what the site looked like in 1998 and the message board in 1999.
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@22 I learned I can like both
I started visiting in the early 2000. I was living in France back then and thanks to this website i could see what was gonna come a year or two down the line.
Maybe it’s an old people dyslexia thing, but I’m reading #16 as “I haven’t been interested in girls in 3 years.”
I should also add, as someone who is visually impaired and finds it difficult to read comics, the podcast has been a tremendous help with keeping up with what’s going on with the books.
I found the site through the podcast. Crawlspace was one of the first podcasts I listened to back in 2006. Been listening ever since.
BTW-George rocks, I love his frank and honest views on the podcast!
Please post in the comment section how long you’ve been visiting:
Visiting for 2 years, but only started listening to the podcast 6 months ago. I should have checked this site out when it started and now I am going back and listening to every episode. I am listening to them from the most recent back to the oldest, I am down to episode 301.
How you discovered it.
I had a friend mention it to me, I checked it out for the articles but never got into podcasts (now that has changed). Your sites podcast inspired me to start a website and podcast of my own:)
I will share it if you guys want but I won’t share it otherwise (I don’t want to be a spammer). I will say I have learned many lessons from reading and listening to your show!
It’d also be fun for you to post your favorite thing about the site.
I love the community, you know everyone here has the same passion even if they disagree about the direction of the character. I also love how the site treats everyone equally unlike other sites ..cough..CBR..cough..that if you say anything negative your posts disappear or you get banned in order to protect the writer and their fragile ego. Don’t get me wrong things should be civil and some people need to be banned.
Happy Birthday to Brad and his fellow Crawlspace contributors! I’ve been visiting this great site for so long I can’t recall how I discovered it in the first place. Maybe I saw a link on Spiderfan?
Here’s to (at least) 17 more great years!
Nice trip down memory lane. i first visited this website when it was on GeoCities. searched Spider-man on Altavista or something. Then I got interested in girls so I stopped for a while. I’ve been back for 3 years
Happy Birthday Crawlspace!
I’ve been reading/listening and occasionally commenting since early 2008. I think I found the site doing a Google search for Spider-man sites…or I found it through another site, I can’t really remember.
lol. I was just a kid & too scared to comment. I found the site off the spider-friends.com site. I had looked that site up after finding an old episode of Spider-man & his amazing friends, which i didnt know existed so looked it up online for more…I remember, Morbius use to write the reviews but I think Ive been on even before that but that was somerhing that stuck out always liked reading his good & funny veiws
HBD crawlspace
lol. I was just a kid & too scared to comment. I found the site off the spider-friends.com site. I had looked that site up after finding an old episode of Spider-man & his amazing friends, which i didnt know existed so looked it up online for more…I remember, Morbius use to write the reviews but I think Ive been on even before that but that was somerhing that stuck out always liked reading his good & funny veiws
@#6-I updated the weird marvel collectibles a couple months ago.
http://www.spidermancrawlspace.com/category/weird-marvel-collectibles/
I’m so old I don’t remember when I first saw this place.
I can’t remember for sure how many years I’ve been visiting the site, in some ways it feels like it’s been forever when in actuality it’s probably only been a few years.
I learned about the Crawl Space, like many old-school visitors through J.R.’s website. I was Googling “spider-man” and found his site and enjoyed his articles greatly. Some of them mentioned the Crawl Space, and there were links to the Crawl Space on most of the page, so I gave it a look. I had no idea who any of these people were, and at the time I had no idea what a podcast was and had no interest in message boards, so I mostly visited the site every day in order to read the daily newspaper strip and read the reviews.
I started leaving comments on the front page, and eventually I saw enough posts about the podcast that it piqued my interest. And yes, I will admit that the first episode I listened to was the one that reviewed the Spider-Man and Avengers porn movies.
And later, I finally started exploring the message board and found the abandoned Funny Crawl Space Podcast Moments thread. And now you know, the rest of the story.
Happy birthday to the Crawl Space!
Hard to believe I’ve also been coming to the site since then and still love it.
Happy birthday Spider-Man crawlspace. This has been my favorite Spider-Man website for a long time and I like the Podcast and comic book reviews.
I must have come across this website within the last five years, don’t really remember.
I do think the Crawl Space, along with Spider-Fan and JR’s SKB articles, are the best resources available to a fan of Spidey comics anywhere online.
Happy anniversary and keep up the great work, Brad & co. I’ve been getting so much enjoyment out of the site and podcasts lately, that I may actually have to kick down some money this year.
I joined the message board in 2004 but had been visiting before then. I found the website shortly after the first Spider-Man movie came out. I got interested in comics again after seeing the preview and when I looked for Spider-Man on the web this site had to of been either the first or second thing that came up. For you youngsters this was before you could type something into Google and get 400 wiki’s or there were tons of comic and pop culture websites covering this stuff. It was all fan made stuff.
My favorite thing about the site is the message board. I have enjoyed the podcast and reviews a lot through the years but being trade only I tend to avoid them now so I don’t get spoiled. The weird Spidey collectables section is always fun to look at as well. I don’t think there has been any new stuff added to it for a while, but it’s been a while since I checked. Does anyone else remember that time Brad and company called that troll’s mom and got him in trouble? LOL!
This is still the only Spidey and comic website I visit and post at regularly. I have enjoyed this website since I found out about it and plan to be around for many more years to come.
Happy birthday Crawlspace! I first visited here… hmm, possibly 2008/9. I remember I’d read through all of JR’s articles on SKB and found a link to here where he said about being on the podcast I think, which is what got me to start listening to it and I’ve been listening since. Anyway, here’s to many more years of web crawling!
I remember happening across your website pretty early on and being blown away by the content, it was very well done and the quality has not diminished over the years. I also remember an animated spider that you had crawling across the screen that scared the poop out of me the first time I saw it. Thought it was really on my T.V. I actually think you can see it on the screen capture you posted of the old message board, to the right of Black Cat.
I joined in 2009, though I had been visiting for a little while before that. To this day, the Crawlspace is still the best damned Spidey-site…PERIOD!
I’ve got a lot of favorite memories over the years. Some of my favorite things about the site were Delta House (The Anti-OMD bastion), and of course Fight Club (Two characters enter, one character leaves!). The podcast also has provided me with endless hours of enjoyment. I used to listen to you guys at work, and people would wonder what the heck I was on when I randomly started cracking up over something Brad, JR, Michael Bailey, Kevin Cushing, or Stella would say…especially when you guys were ripping apart an issue you didn’t like (Shed, anyone?)
But my absolute favorite thing about this site is the camaraderie between both the admins and the visitors. If you think this is just another Spider-Man site, you couldn’t be more wrong. It truly feels more like a family at times than just a bunch of Spider-Fans talking about their favorite character. We’ve seen each other through good times and bad: school, job transitions, marriages, deaths, births…you name it.
Thank you guys for all of the hard work you put into this place, and for giving us this great site. May your spiders never sputter, and your webbing never wander.
EXCELSIOR!
AmFan15 / Mike
Congrats! I remember just surfing the web looking for information on Spider-Man when I stumbled upon your site. I am glad I did. The site is informative and just plain fun! Thanks for your hard work. It is appreciated.
I just got here in 2008 and it feels like I’ve been here a bajillion years. But no – it was around a decade before I ever arrived. Blows my mind! 😎