Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behavior. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth-all this is surely vain and futile.

—Aldous Huxley, in the foreword to the 1967 edition of Brave New World

background

Captain Jim is a comic-format story I started around 1990 (while attending Eastern I.S.).

It made its way onto the Web in 1994 (at MBHS, on our RS6k's brand-new httpd, which was back when the Web still had that "new" smell).

It gained some readers and won some awards. I showed it off to people walking by at Supercomputing ’94 where I was there on High School Day (11/16/04).

Most of the early visitors were NCSA Mosaic users, excited to see something other than plain text on a gray background. It was a big deal when Mosaic Netscape was released; its JPEG support meant each page of Captain Jim could now be viewed inline, on the site itself. (This would eventually become the standard presentation model for comics on the Web.)

I started school at Rice in 1995; by the fall of 1996 I had pretty much stopped updating Captain Jim.

Stupidly, I later removed these pages from the Web, imagining that I would soon replace them with a new story.

Since then I've learned that there's no reason to ever remove anything from the Web. (See quote from Aldous Huxley above; we must preserve, understand, and ultimately avoid our mistakes. Also, people still occasionally want to browse Captain Jim.) So here is the original captain jim site, circa 1996, restored for your nostalgic surfing pleasure.

Some of the links and images may be broken. (I know about the randomized preview image on the nexus page.) If you find anything glaringly broken, do let me know.

previous cj frontpages and websites

	"six" teaser 2000 * "six" teasers 1999: [1] [2] * teaser 1998
	"stable" captain jim site, 1996 this was the last version of the site I did, and the one that was around the longest. start here to read the whole story.
	homepages 1995: [3] [2, alternate versions: 2b, 2c] [1] (incl. my Mozilla award)
	the original 1994 homepage

new, oct. 2003: an index of the many graphical excerpts from issues 66–71

special bonus story

	As a symbol of my masochistic desire to put bad art back on the web, I offer this previously unseen (and miserably incomplete) experimental CJ short-story: "233".

awards and such

InfiNet “Cool Site Of The Day” — Jan. 2, 1995. (evidence: Still Cool list for Jan '95).

Mozilla Communications Corporation “What's Cool” award, circa 1995. (evidence: sketchy, besides the Mozilla “what's cool” badge I seem to have kept)

{ dan sandler, 11/9/2001 }
{ new excerpt feature, 10/2003 }
{ Huxley quote and mild redesign, 9/2004 }