die titanic sinkt in panik ganz allanig! let's deca-dance!

• ✠ who's this nerd (about naan)


• ✠ why site (naan drops her wallet with pictures of hans)


• ✠ why site, revisited (naan actually answers the question)

:: ✠ who's this nerd?

Jello! I'm NAAN, and I usually make comics....when I don't decide to take on one thousand projects at the same time, such as making the funny books, managing a comic collective AND this site!

My background is in linguistics and graphic design, with a heaping dose of, well, comics! Not really the background you might expect for a fan of someone like Hans, I guess, but it only just means I get to use my German major skillz more...( *rubs hands for a future Bayerisch info dump* )

I'm also Puerto Rican, born and bred, living somewhere in the Midwest for the past few years now. I follow the philosophy of one talking horse. Dadaism rules, and the Magic Bishop and his wife need a scholarly book. (Yes, both at the same time.)

:: ✠ Why make the site?

Hans is one of my favorite characters, if not usually my #1 at times. I knew nothing about him until either my mother or I saw the Enemy Ace: War in Heaven trade paperback at our local public library. I say my mother as a possibility because she was (and still is) always on the lookout for anything that could appeal to me or could be of interest to me. But my brain also wants to say that I saw the cover for the trade paperback and took it out myself because the cover art was gorgeous...but it kinda scared me??? I don't know, I remember feeling dread for some reason when looking at the cover and skimming the pages before I took it home.

And then I was left with a deep sorrow after reading it -- the kind of story that stays in your mind and makes you depressed for all the reasons. Naturally, I kept re-reading and re-reading it like the masochist I am until I had to return it LOL

I always had an interest in WWII since high school, and part of my German studies in college entailed, naturally, eventually, talking about everything about that war. (Yes, including the nitty gritty worse parts. If you think folks in German classes avoid those because I don't know, yours did, you're wrong.)

I want to say it was around 2007 or 2008. I honestly can't remember. For me, it was more akin to "before Enemy Ace" and "after Enemy Ace" in terms of when I got into him. Again, I knew nothing about Hans and never heard of him before, but I quite liked War in Heaven -- again, see the above. This trade paperback had reprinted the Enemy Ace Special after the main story, which further blew my mind. I'm not sure why or how that special stuck out so much to me: was it that it was (technically) the prequel to War in Heaven and made everything else so much more painful? Was it Joe Kubert's gorgeous art? The way it felt real and realistic, and the emotions portrayed so beautifully? Was it the nihilism of Hans combined with an extremely relatable desire to not be feared but to be liked at least a little bit? Was it the flowery writing from Robert Kanigher that never overstayed but instead colored the story more? Was it the fact that this was about WWI, a war not usually "mined" for comics? (At the time)

Or maybe it was that Hans is quite good-looking

Heck if I know. I just knew I had to read more.

Not surprising to anyone who is also a fan and wants to get the physical copies as opposed to pirating getting digital copies, getting comics related to Hans is very hard--more so when the Chaykin and Severin stories weren't usually reprinted, so you'd have to hunt down the actual issues. (That Showcase edition is a lifesaver, y'all, just so you know.) But whatever snippet I could find online, whatever sites talked about some of the stories (I was prepared for Schatzi long beforehand, thanks, fellow masochists) it was like the appetizer to the future meal.

Granted, when I got to finally reading the comics, some of them paled in comparison to what I thought they were. But you know, there was always something interesting even in them. Or maybe it was just me and reading them and going "SOMETHING NEW ABOUT HANS!"

(Hey, I'm a comic creator who loves focusing more on characters. I got my biases!)

:: ✠ too long, didn't read, but why make the site again?

Okay, okay--to be frank, I was never the kind of person to make anything fan content-wise beyond making fanart. Fansites? Seems like it takes way too long to manage and my school schedule was never kind to free time. I was stupid, I didn't know how to code, also money, you need money for a fun domain name??? Obviously things have changed since late 90s/early 2000s for me...also, I didn't realize that you could actually sign up for a free site but I was also quite selfish, I wanted a fancy domain name!

The only time I attempted to do something fannish that I knew was manageable was creating a fanlisting for one of my absolutely favorite songs. (Don't ask me about the anime, I've never seen it.) As you may notice, I got over the fancy domain name part, given the sub-domain name. it also helped that someone offered to host me and honestly, I wish emails still worked after the fact because I would like to save and host this site myself--and thank the person and also ask them to let me have it lol

But the FL quickly died, due to not a lot of folks joining and once again, I grew so busy, that I purposefully let it die. You can tell this was before mobile design *had* to be king, because it's clearly not easy to navigate on mobile and it was made with Photoshop slices. Yeah, that's how old THAT is XD

Fast forward a few years -- Geocities dies, a bunch of sites disappear and I've gotten good enough to at least edit most code in a way that satisfied me until my nemesis, mobile web design, strikes -- that comic collective's site? All me. Bootstrap is a god-send. That said, this site isn't made with Bootstrap due to the nature of the original code...in Japanese...

I digress. Point is, in recent years, I've been thinking about...a "place" for Hans. I want a place where I can save everything I've learned or saved from the internet long ago, have a place where I can ramble non-stop without having to tie a straightjacket on me and also...spread the word about a very underrated character.

I've noticed throughout the years on this long internet road that there are a couple more fans of Hans cropping up--and if there was one thing I always liked about fansites, is that fans could find each other, peruse the site and maybe even chat with fellow fans on forums, if the site had them. But current fans only have a few posts on Tumblr and Discord. All scattered.

Forums are impossible to bring back but fansites are gaining some traction again, especially due to young fans realizing what we olden fans knew: that indeed the internet is ethereal and it is better to have your own spot to commiserate with others. Is it a big movement? Not really. I doubt it'll make an impact. But it would be nice if it still grew.

So I made this, so that not only I have a place for myself, but so that other people can see what has been done with Hans, and see the resources available to read even more about him!