Those few of you who have ninthart on your friends pages have probably just had the paged deluged.

That’s because today is Ninth Art‘s final update, and it’s bloody enormous.

After a bit over five years, we’re shutting up the shop. Not that, to be honest, it’s much to do with me. The article I wrote (my Top Nine comics, should anyone who hasn’t been reading 9A be interested) in this update is my first contribution to the site in a about two years, aside from a little bit of programming tweaking that no-one but I will have noticed, and prior to that, I was just producing the odd column. I’ve never had much to do with the regular running of the site.

Credit for keep the site running, week in, week out belongs to anw and antonyjohnston. Andrew has edited every damn word on that site (one and a quarter million words at a conservative estimate, or about 10 novels worth) and Antony has dressed up some 1200 articles with header graphics and images. Every bloody week.

So, please, give the pair of them a round of applause, as they shuffle off to the sanatorium, broken and gibbering.

Ninth Art will remain in place as an archive, and there’s a bit more work required to change it from a chronological publishing tool to a useful archive (which probably means I’ll spend more time tinkering with it over the next few years than I ever have while it was live) but for now, that’s all she wrote.