Comics Alliance Shut Down By AOL

AOL, the parent company of comics news site ComicsAlliance, have reportedly closed down operations on the site.

Comic Book Resources's Robot 6 blog say they've confirmed the rumors, which began making the rounds this weekend at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. AOL also closed AOL Music and several music news and video sites on Friday, which is reportedly when staffers at ComicsAlliance got the news. Laura Hudson, who founded the site in August 2009, left in June and was replaced by former Vertigo editor Joe Hughes, who employed a staff including Chris Sims, Andy Khouri and David Brothers. Hudson confirmed the news by retweeting the link to the Robot 6 report. "Obviously there are people who this affects far more directly than me now, and it's not my place to speak for them," Hudson said. "Working on that site...was the proudest experience of my life. Not just because I got to work with such amazing people, but I found out that so many other fans wanted the same thing I did from comics. For the record: It wasn't performance-related. The traffic on the site was better than ever." The site, a three-time Eisner Award nominee, is widely respected, but were almost always an entire day behind big news, and they broke almost no news in the recent past. As a result, when ComicsAlliance posted no new content over the weekend it might have gone unnoticed if not for both C2E2 and Stumptown Comics Fest taking place at the time, and rumors beginning to circulate among industry pros at those conventions. Robot 6 notes that this morning, ComicsAlliance's weekly "War Rocket Ajax" podcast, which typically appears on Mondays at ComicsAlliance, was relegated to Sims' personal website.