Comics / Spotlight / Knowledge and Scholarship

Who's Who - Samuel and Philippe

By Hervé St-Louis
July 31, 2012 - 23:17

I’ve worked with several interns over the years and often they had to work on ComicBookBin projects. One of them, starting in April 2005 was the conversion of the static ComicBookBin Website into a content management system that would allow us to deploy articles faster, but also allow the writers to post their own articles and not rely on me to post them once a week on their behalf. Samuel and Philippe each came from competing schools but worked together to complete this project as well as help me with other tasks at Toon Doctor.

Samuel was more of a designer than Philippe who in turns, was more technical. I set up the architecture of the content management and designed it, but Samuel worked mostly at designing the first ComicBookBin version using the contents management system. He created the colourful banners and graffiti logo that would adorn ComicBookBin between 2005 and 2008. There were four banners, one red, one green, one blue and one yellow for each season. These would be rotated as well as the colour scheme used on the site. Although in hindsight, I felt the graffiti logo was hard to decipher – did it really say ComicBookBin, it was very dynamic and unique.

Philippe was working on other projects before he joined Samuel into one of the most grueling job ever; populating our contents management system with static articles created manually by myself. It was a boring job, but you know what, it’s what interns are for. Both Samuel and Philippe were about 19 to 20 years old. It funny to have had the work together. Samuel was more urban and had a more rebellious look. His graffiti logo reflected that. Philippe was more business-like and clean-cut. But both worked well with one another. At the time the amount of articles to enter did not really go over 2000. It probably barely scraped 1000. It’s much more different than today’s 18,000 articles which are still hard to manage. Once in a while I find a bug in an article and have to refresh it or add a missing picture, correct some creator’s credits and so on.

Both Samuel and Philippe quickly found jobs after their two months internship @Toon Doctor. I have to say that the schools I recruited them from at the time were very good even if they had some differences in training. Cégep Édouard Monpetit had more emphasis on new technologies (at the time) such as DVDs. Cégep de Maisonneuve had more emphasis on design and Web development. If Toon Doctor were still in Montreal, we would recruit more students from both schools. In fact I did but they didn’t work on ComicBookBin projects to the same extent both Samuel and Philippe did way back.

*Cégeps in Québec are community colleges that students must attend before attending university. They also teach trades such as multimedia and Web development which is what both Samuel and Philippe were studying.

Who's Who @ComicBookBin is a feature celebrating the 10th anniversary of ComicBookBin where publisher Hervé St-Louis features writers past and present that have contributed to ComicBookBin over the years.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12