Derailed

I've become more of a live-and-let-live guy in the past couple years, but I'm still pretty honest, and so I'll honestly say that comics review site The Fourth Rail's passing causes me no sadness. If anything, I considered it dead as soon as Randy Lander retired from the site, and didn't enjoy it prior to that. I'm also pleased at the demise of any site that predates Comic Book Galaxy or that started some time around our start in 2001. At its best, T4R was a meat-and-potatoes review site, where if you wanted a large quantity of reviews of mostly superhero books, The Fourth Rail could be relied upon to have reviews of just about anything from Marvel, DC, Image, and relatively safe smaller publishers like Oni. Rather than being well-rounded, Lander's and MacPherson's tastes were edgeless. When I found I could predict the grade Randy would give any book 80% of the time (within a point), what purpose was there in reading the reviews? It certainly wasn't the writing style, which was always functional but suffered greatly from having so much to cover every week. Still, Randy had some good moments, and at worst, had his blind spots like most of us do. Don was never my cup of tea, so I'm not likely to check out his new site. I did see a little of Randy's new site, ComicPants, and it isn't bad. It seems he's more energized and hanging around his friend Dave has increased his snarkiness, which is a good thing.