It’s been about twenty years since I first met Eoin Ryan, the artist behind Space Avalanche. While spreading the news of his latest Batman-themed comic everywhere and anywhere I can think of, an odd thought struck me – The reason we first met and eventually became friends was Batman.

Twenty years ago I was five feet tall and had an outrageous twang to my voice as a result of six years of American schooling in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Apart from the desert heat, great sports fields, and pools, Jeddah was fantastic for it’s imported technology at bargain prices, and access to freely pirated music and movies from Asian countries. This meant that I found myself in a small Irish town with access to the summer’s biggest blockbuster several months before it would appear in Irish cinemas – Tim Burton’s original Batman. Not a bad bargaining chip for a fish-out-of-water twelve year old in a new school in a country he didn’t really remember very well.

Long story short, Eoin hatched a totally transparent plot to make friends based entirely on the fact that he’d be able to watch Batman before everyone else in the country. Minor disagreements aside, we’ve been good friends ever since.

Twenty years down the line, we’ve been working on this web comic nonsense as a bit of a labor of love in our spare time. Eoin does the creative bit, and I play the part of the town crier who moonlights fixing webservers. In the meantime we’ve been nominated for the Irish Web Awards, made the front pages of Digg and Reddit, and become rich and famous. What have we learned in the process?

Well, mainly that it’s bloody hard work. In a later post I’ll go into the various ways we’ve tried to spread the word and how it’s affected our traffic.