User blog:ARTaylor/10 Years of the Marvel Animated Universe Wiki

It was ten years ago that a college student in San Francisco, frustrated that he was unable to do much expanding on popular fandom sites like Wikipedia and Memory-Alpha, decided to start a wiki of his own and start from scratch. He wanted to use his love of writing combined with his geeky knowledge to create a new site. Since he loved Marvel Comics he decided to base this site on those characters. Unfortunately, someone beat him to the punch with a site on Marvel's movies, so he decided to combine his love of Marvel with his love of animation and focus on Marvel's animated series. He noticed that there was a site for the DC Animated Universe, a collection of interconnected series and films, but none for the equivalent Marvel Animated Universe comprised of X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man Unlimited, and The Avengers: United They Stand.

He remembered the series fondly, for the most part, from his childhood and knew that they connected with characters, events, actors, and creators. He realized that if someone could piece together DC's animated works then someone should do the same for Marvel's. So that is what he set the site out to do, put together Marvel's collected works and find the connections putting them into one larger universe. However, he soon realized that the scope of such a site was limited. There were only eight series across nineteen seasons spanning nine years. While that is a lot to go through, it would eventually come to an end when all pages were expanded as much as they could and there was no more from that particular universe coming. Fortunately, he did realize that his initial proposal left it open for covering all of Marvel's works not just those from the 1990s. So that's exactly what he did.

The site expanded into covering Marvel's long history of animated works, from the classic 1966 series The Marvel Super Heroes and 1967 Spider-Man series to the animated features like Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned, Ultimate Avengers, and Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher to the recent works like Guardians of the Galaxy and last year's Spider-Man. Over the last ten years this site as expanded to include over four-thousand articles covering characters, episodes, series, films, and the companies that have comprised Marvel's animated works. It has brought together not just fans but actors and creators as well. And so long as Marvel keeps making animated series, films, and shorts so too will this site go on to catalog it all.