You reading this post days, weeks, months or years into the future may disagree with me, but now that the site is dead, we who ran it have the privilege of publishing the final, official word on the matter of its life. For some reason, as the chaotic good (at least most of the time) half of The Dot and Line’s two blog dads, it was important to me to make three statements as we shutter the shop, mostly so that we’re on the record about it.
The Dot and Line was born of love and excitement.
John and I loved animated cartoons, and the website we founded is not ending due to any sort of diminished excitement for the form. It’s actually the opposite. As our ambition grew to editing dozens of writers over the years and publishing hundreds of stories about how cartoons touch people, make them feel seen, and spur creators to artistic heights—we only grew more enthusiastic about the medium and its possibilities. There’s plenty we did not get to, a reality I made peace with a long time ago simply because I realized early on that no niche site could possibly cover it all. Comprehensiveness was never the point, and it’s a task I happily leave at the feet of other journalists and outlets. Quality and voice and passion were the point—whether the posts were gag-filled blogs or in-depth features. Feel free to disagree with me and file your complaints to I.C. Weiner at seymour.asses@futurama.com, but in my humble opinion our writers excelled in those three areas on basically every story.
The Dot and Line was always ours and yours.
If that sounds haughty, it’s because of how seriously I take this blog dad metaphor, whether or not I was ever a perfect blog dad. (News flash: I wasn’t, and I made lots of embarrassing mistakes.) But you can’t be objective about your baby. Co-founding something, I’ve learned, makes you not just reflexively proud of the thing but also prideful of it. It’s ours, ergo it’s great. Obviously! Crucially, we never sold any part of it, despite some false starts and frequent, sputtering attempts. Some might see that as failure, but I—your very reliable narrator in all this—look at it very differently. We never sold ads, but we were also never beholden to advertisers. We never partnered with benefactors, but we retained our independence. We never made money, but our publishing schedule was our own. The Dot and Line was never a job and John and I were never bosses except in how we directed coverage and edited stories, and because of that, our collaborators worked with us off a kind of personal and social capital that we will never be able to repay. I will owe John, Sammy, Elly, Marley, and all of our writers forever, and I cherish that. That debt was worth it because they allowed me the freedom to write and edit and curate this site’s stories without ever becoming a salesman for the work. And fuck, what a privilege that was.
The Dot and Line is dead on its own terms.
It’s that last point that I went back and forth on in this site’s first few years. It’s not like we didn’t try to make money. (To be clear, we’re actually still trying to make a little money: please give what you can to our writers via GoFundMe, which is all going to the writers who’ve trusted us with their voices since the start.) But four years and change is a long time to do one thing, and we’re all creative, driven individuals who have other passions beyond this one. For about five seconds, John and I toyed with the idea of handing the site off to new leadership, and I won’t speak for his feelings on that, but I knew my ego didn’t want that. The fact that there won’t be a Dot and Line without us fills me with a perverse sense of warmth toward the Dot and Line we built together. I don’t know if preemptive nostalgia is healthy or not, but I don’t particularly care. We all mourn in our own way.
The Dot and Line that was will remain.
The writing we’ve published this week under the That’s All, Folks! banner has been all about goodbyes, but it’s also about been about leaving you, the reader, and ourselves, the editors and writers, with things to look back on. The original Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies stinger that we borrowed the name from has that effect—its looping cursive, bouncy music, and Porky Pig’s stutter sending you away on the implicit promise that the farewell is as joyous as what came before.
In that spirit, the following is a poem I’ve always meant to quote at the Dot and Line since our first editorial package, Nicktoons Month, which was published 25 years after the three original Nickelodeon cartoons (Rugrats, Doug, and The Ren and Stimpy Show) debuted. For one reason or another—the timing wasn’t quite right, or we were too busy with other pieces, or it slipped my mind when conditions were ideal—I never blogged about it. It’s from the Rugrats episode “Mother’s Day,” which first aired May 6, 1997. It revealed that Chuckie’s mom died of a terminal illness before the events of Rugrats, a story that’s as good an example as any of the creative potential of animated television. She left the lad with this poem, tenderly read by none other than the great Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City fame.
My sweet, little Chuckie, though I must leave you behind me
This poem will tell you where you always can find me.
When a gentle wind blows, that’s my hand on your face.
And when the tree gives you shade, that’s my sheltering embrace.
When the sun gives you freckles, that’s me tickling my boy.
When the rain wets your hair, those are my tears of joy.
When the long grass enfolds you, that’s me holding you tight.
When the Whippoorwill sings, that’s me whispering, “Night, night.”
The Dot and Line’s archives will live on. Today we leave you behind us, but you’ll always know where to find us. Tchau, turma.
Thanks for reading The Dot and Line, where we’ve written about animation of all kinds for more than four years. We’ll miss you! If you’ll miss us too, show us some love on Twitter and show our writers the money on GoFundMe. Read our goodbyes here: That’s All, Folks!
