Toonopedia was created by Donald D. Markstein, a long-time lover of all forms of cartoon, and is “the world’s first hypertext encyclopedia of toons”. Although most people think of cartoon in the animated sense, Markstein also included comic books, newspaper strips and more. Markstein recognized that there are countless cartoons, so he focused on American ones for Toonopedia. With > 1,800 entries on different toons, Toonopedia is not a small project, but neither is it all-encompassing. What is here is thorough and well-written, with no typographical errors to make reading difficult, but there is a lot of missing information from thousands of other toons that are not represented on Toonopedia. This was a side project for Markstein, who added in entries when he had time for them, and his goal was to work on this for the rest of his life, continuously adding to Toonopedia to make it as complete as possible. Sadly, Markstein died in 2012, so the Web site has not been updated since 2011. It remains as he left it, but there has been no new content.
The site logo is a colorful text with the site’s name, and is the only source of color on the page. It is not a link back to the main page like most Web sites currently have, which makes navigation a little tricky sometimes. Directly beneath that are the navigation links. Most of these do not go to new pages, but just direct the user to places further down on the main page. The articles written on the various cartoons are one of these, and are organized alphabetically by their first letter. They are simply a long list of text links, which take the user to a new page with the article written about it. One helpful thing on the Web site is a series of links to companies that produce cartoons, which makes it easy to find more information about a cartoon that one loves. At the bottom of the main page is a new series of navigation links. Some of these are the same as those at the top of the page, but some new ones have been added. The layout is just a lot of bulky text, with no color and almost no images to break it up, but the information provided is valuable. Every page has a small text blurb asking the user to donate to the site to keep it up, which is small but toward the top of each page so it remains noticeable.
Due to only being text on the pages, there is no wait time for pages to load. Using the Web site is easy, so it does not need (or provide) any help files. To facilitate navigation, once the user is on a page for a cartoon article, there is a Google-based search box on the right side, and so finding a different article is a quick task.
There are no other Web sites that are as extensive as Toonopedia when it comes to cartoons, but this is also not a complete source, and Markstein is not an expert on the subject, just a lover, and due to his death, Toonopedia will no longer be updated. For anyone who wants more information on American cartoons, this is a valuable resource with which to start.
