Hello New Zealand from The Aquaman Shrine

During my morning run, I was listening to one of my favorite movie podcasts, the slashfilmcast, hosted by David Chen. Chen just got back from a junket to New Zealand, where he got to see footage of the upcoming Tintin movie and even meet Peter Jackson!

Anyway, Chen was amazed to learn the slashfilmcast had fans in New Zealand, and his brother remarked that "you know you're pretty popular if you have fans in New Zealand", because the country is so remote. Of course, that got me wondering...

So I looked into the Shrine's hit tracking data, and found that, yes, The Aquaman Shrine also has fans in New Zealand! The Shrine had 71 hits last month from there, 15 in the last week. As the biggest, darkest circle indicates, most are from Auckland, which is the country's largest and most populated area. But as you can see, the Shrine has fan almost running the full length of New Zealand!


The Aquaman Shrine has grown in every conceivable way the last few years, with major growth coming in the last few months--undoubtedly due to the Sea King's much more prominent role in the DCU. I'm very proud of that, and look forward to see what else we can do to grow the site and make it even bigger and more fun for Aqua-Fans all over the world!

The Shrine issues a hearty hello and thanks to all its New Zealand fans!

Ads!

Everyone hates the web ads; none more so than me. But occasionally there's an actual cool one, like this ad that was running on the Shrine this morning (sent in by F.O.A.M.er Dennis Doucette).

I have no idea if this ad just happened to run on the Shrine or if tfaw.com made it especially for the Shrine; in any case it's cool!

Thanks Dennis!

Message From The Aquaman Shrine

If any of you Aqua-Fans out there are amateur (or even pro!) musicians/DJs and would like to help The Aquaman Shrine out on a project, please drop me a line via the Shrine's email address and I will give you the details.

Thanks!

The Aquaman Shrine on Comic Chatcast!

Just a reminder! Tonight @9pm EST I'll be the guest on Comic Chatcast, a live, online discussion site, where I'll be talking about Aquaman, comic blogging, and anything else people ask me about!

Hop on over to Comic ChatCast tonight and join in the fun!

The Aquaman Shrine on Comic Chatcast!

Just thought I'd let everyone know, on Tuesday March 30th @9pm EST I'll be the guest on Comic Chatcast, a live, online discussion site, where I'll be talking about Aquaman, comic blogging, and anything else people ask me about!

So if you can't get enough of me talking about Aquaman (and you can't, can you?) then hop on over to Comic ChatCast on Tuesday night and join in the fun!

Agents of F.O.A.M.

After a couple of weeks thinking about it, I've decided to go ahead with the Agents of F.O.A.M. effort, where various con-attending Aqua-Fans can get sets of Aquaman Shrine stickers from me to give out.

My first attempt featured the tagline "Come Worship @ The Aquaman Shrine" at the bottom, and there were a couple of comments regarding the potential inappropriateness of that phrase to some of our more religious readers.

Not wanting to offend anybody (I mean, this is a blog about about Aquaman, for Neptune's Sake), but also not wanting to get rid of what I thought was a perfectly fine turn of phrase (it is called the Aquaman Shrine, after all, and the subheading is "A Daily Devotional"), I decided to split the difference and feature six different taglines:

"Come Worship @ The Aquaman Shrine"
"Make Finny Friends @ The Aquaman Shrine"
"Salute The Sea King @ The Aquaman Shrine"
"Pay Homage @ The Aquaman Shrine"
"Ride The Waves @ The Aquaman Shrine"
"Jump Into The Deep End @ The Aquaman Shrine"

Each sheet of stickers (seen above) features all six taglines, so any of you who wants to get some of these to give out can do so without any reservations!

Since I'm printing these myself, using pre-made round sticker sheets (harder to find than you'd think), they're not perfect--some are a little off-register and stuff, but overall I think they look cool and I love that I could retain my original circular design!

So if any of you want some stickers, shoot me an email and let me know. If you want to send me some money via Paypal (same email address) to help cover costs, by all means do so--but its not obligatory. I'm more interested in getting these out there, as far and wide as possible. (That said, if everyone who wants to give these babies out chipped in a little, that would enable me to get more and more of these made, not to mention go towards the purchase of printer cartridges. Let your conscience guide you.)

With con season upon us and Classic Aquaman poised to make a triumphant return to the DCU, now's the time, Aqua-Fans!


Update: As usual, I didn't quite think through something I wrote before posting it, and its up to you Aqua-Fans to help me make it better.

To keep things simple, let's say there are two ways you can contribute to the effort if you want to get some stickers to distribute:

Donations: Like I said above, a cash donation is not obligatory. But if you want to, you can Paypal me at this email address the flat amount of $5.00 (otherwise known as...a fin).

Stickers: F.O.A.M.er Derek Richardson had a good idea--instead of a cash donation, you can buy your own set of stickers and send them to me to use.

Problem is, they have to be specific stickers--which I found at a tiny online retailer known as Mister Ink Jet. You can find them on this page, (they're the fifth item from the top, 6 stickers per sheet, 10 sheets for $5.00) and have them sent to me. I'll then print them up and ship 'em off to you!

Finally, to help get people inspired, I'm going to run an unofficial little contest, as well. Those of you go to the effort of giving out the stickers will have a chance to win...something I haven't quite figured out yet.

How? Well, if one of you Agents of F.O.A.M. manage to get a sticker in the hands of someone really cool, take a pic and send it in. I'll post them as I get 'em!

Agent of F.O.A.M.?

In the previous post, I asked about any potential Aqua-Fans about attending the Emerald City Comic Con. That's because there's an idea I've had for a while, but an email from F.O.A.M.er Joe Slab this afternoon spurred me to get moving on it.

As we head into "con season", I've always wanted the Shrine (and, conversely, Aquaman) to have some sort of presence, but right now I'm limited to only attending a couple of local shows (Philly and NYC).

But since the Shrine has so many fans, all over the world, I've thought about producing some sort of little giveaway item to send out to selected Agents of F.O.A.M. so they could give them out at cons. My first idea is a 3" sticker, seen above, which I think would help spread the word.

So, what do you Aqua-Fans who are planning to hit the cons think? Would you like a little item like this to have to hand out? If I get enough positive response, I'll pony up the dough and get these babies made. Let me know via the poll at right!


Update: F.O.A.M.er Joe Mello suggested also using the above sticker as a "badge" that bloggers can post on their blogs to declare their Aqua-Fandom. I thought that was a great idea, so here are some 225 pixel-wide badges that you can download and use. More colors coming:

All I ask is if you do use this on your blog, please link it back to the Shrine. Thanks!


Update 2: F.O.A.M.er Russell Burbage suggested, to help defray the cost, that everyone could download their own badge and print it out on sticker paper.

Since I really want the sticker to be round (I'm a...stickler for graphic design), I'd rather print them out myself. But I like Russell's idea of ameliorating the costs, since that would enable me to make lots of these, possibly in perpetuity.

I'm thinking of setting up a Paypal account, where anyone who wants some of these stickers to hand out could donate something like $2 or $3 to the cause. Then I'd get as many stickers made out of that pool of money. All it would cost me would be mailing them around, which is no big deal and something I'm totally willing to do!

So let's see what kind of numbers the poll racks up...