FINALLY . . . THE RUSS HAS COME BACK TO SHOTGUNREVIEWS.COM!

Top 5 Favorite Shotgun moments

 by Russell Ray

I'm Russ. I used to write pro wrestling articles and was the managing editor for Shotgun for a while. If you want to know more, go bug Troy. He will probably write a blurb about each of us because I am too LAZY to write my own bio.

Anyway, I think I was the third or fourth person who came on board after the site initially launched in '99, and that period to 2002 was probably my favorite time on the site and what I would consider to be my heyday. At the time, I went through 3 jobs that I hated and wrote as much as I could while on the clock just to get through the day. Here are my top 5 favorite memories of that time:

5) Free schwag. Before the internet economy tanked and then the rest of the economy afterwards, people would throw free stuff at us with just the mention of the word "press". It's only recently with the advent of social media and the resurgence of blogs that this has picked back up again, but if Troy was good at two things, they were the best things to be good at: hiding dead bodies and scoring free (fill in the blank).

In the wrestling boom, we got the trifecta: ECW, WCW Monday Nitro, and a WWE house show. The house show was my favorite wrestling experience ever. I would rather watch a house show than Raw/Smackdown.

ECW was... well, it was ECW, and I guess it's one of those things that at least I could say I did it. The Indianapolis house show was cool from a historical standpoint because it was Mike Awesome's last appearance before running off to WCW (the crowd was about to lynch the guy) and Taz came back from WWE for one night to win the ECW Championship.

WCW was where Troy got to hand a business card to the possible next future Mrs. George Clooney, Stacy Keibler. This was when they were doing Nitro Girl auditions all over the country. Who knew that he would pick the one that would become the most famous?  (Troy's Note: Yeah, I was really going out on a limb there . . .)

Also, I got a complete set of the Royal Rumble Anthology 5 years ago... I guess I still owe WWE that review.

Shotgun Reviews: A Welcome

Shotgun Reviews:  A Welcome

I can hear it now.  Some of you are saying, “How the hell did I get here?”  Some are saying, “Why does Sparkshooter link here?”  And others are saying, “Not this shit again.”  Well, those are all fair points I suppose.  Whatever the reason, whether you remember or whether you’re new, welcome to ShotgunReviews.com.

Who the Hell are These People?

My name is Troy Brownfield.  In 1998, after several years writing for my high school and college papers, booking a ton of musical festivals and one-off shows, and getting a job in Indianapolis, I started writing for Comic Kingdom, the website of my friend Nick Jankowski.  I put together two columns: The Big Question, which was an interview column wherein the subject would answer only one, frequently complex, question.  The other column was based on one of my regular college paper concepts.  I called it Shotgun Reviews because it spread out and covered a wide area.  I usually would throw in a movie, a comic, and a CD, maybe a TV show or something else.  As things kept rolling, I thought that maybe I should just put together my own site, maybe with the aim of giving other aspiring writers a house.

Troy and Shawn in 2004

In June 1999, with the help of original webmaster Shawn Delaney, that’s exactly what I did.  And really, it went pretty well.  The site kind of took off, more or less, and before we knew it, we were putting up booths at Wizard World shows, getting quoted on things like volumes of “Dragonball Z”, doing radio and TV appearances (ah, the great Jordana Green crowning) and generally having a great freaking time.

One of the great things about the site was the flexibility it gave everyone.  If you were into something, you could build on it.  Russ branched out and became the ring announcer for WCWO in Indianapolis.  Jonathan Birdsong and Oseye Boyd put together a great crew of reviewers in the Lyrical Lounge section.  Shawn, always a musician, played in local bands like The Shivers and Samsell, and I brought back my old booking skills by having the site sponsor or host package shows with Indy indie bands.  And that was just the tip.

My own writing stretched out, and I started contributing to places like Comicon.com’s The Pulse and Newtype USA magazine.  I wound up writing for Newtype more or less after meeting Ken Wiatrek of ADV in Chicago, and he was one of the forces behind my becoming acquainted with Corey Henson.  Corey was one of the early “second wave” Shotgun gang, along with The Rev. OJ Flow, whom I first “met” (along with Jim Beard) on the DC Direct boards at DCComics.com.  OJ and Corey would soon join me in another crazy endeavor.