25th anniversary

If you follow me on Bluesky, you know I’ve been sharing memories from my career in comics for the last 25 days, counting down to today. 

How it started…

Twenty-five years ago today, I posted my first comic on the Web. Greystone Inn first appeared on a GeoCities site on February 14, 2000.

 

On April 16, 2001, it began running in the Philadelphia Daily News. I self-syndicated the strip to other newspapers, and by 2008, I estimated that my comic was being seen by about 1.2 million readers a week.

 

Greystone Inn ran online Monday through Saturday until the end of June 2005. The next day, Evil Inc was launched.

 
 
At the beginning of 2016, the comic-strip format was retired in favor of a comic-book approach and the site began updating twice a week in half-page chunks.

The past 24 years have also seen the rise of some other projects I'm very proud of. Courting Disaster, a single-panel strip about sex and relationships was launched on Jan 12, 2005. It was originally created to accompany a sex-advice column that ran in the Philadelphia Daily News.

 

It ended in 2012 when I left that newspaper, but it was reinvented as Courting Disaster Uncensored, a NSFW feature available only to Patreon backers and in printed collections. Today, the general concept lives on — in the form of the bonus cartoons I post on Mondays.

 

Phables was a full-page comic about life in Philadelphia which started on Feb. 25, 2006. It was nominated for an Eisner Award for best webcomic the following year. It lost to an advertisement for a video game. I'm not making that up.

 

And, of course, Evil Inc After Dark, my first NSFW series, was launched officially in April 2015.

Along the way, there have been dozens of other projects I've been proud of — Webcomics.com, Arch Bros, Webcomics Weekly, Surviving Creativity, ComicLab, How to Make Webcomics, Webcomics Confidential, Tales from the Con, The Webcomics Handbook, The Everything Cartooning Book, Hey Comics — Kids!, teaching classes in both sequential art and entrepreneurship at Hussian College School of Art, teaching Storytelling and TV Story Analysis at University of the Arts, winning the award for Comic Book Writer of the Year at the Philadelphia Geek Awards in 2012, back-to-back nominations for Best Online Longform Comic from the National Cartoonists Society, and winning a ’Ringo Award

Whew! It's been a busy 25 years!

And none of it would have been possible without your support — on my sites, at comic-convention appearances, and here on Substack. You folks have been with me every step of the way, and I couldn't be more grateful.

The Future of the American Comic Strip

The LA Times has an excellent story about the future of the comic strip, as seen by the likes of Berke Breathed, Cathy Guisewite, and Wiley Miller. They are appearing at a panel discussion in LA on Sunday.

I can’t say it better than Mr. Breathed: “ ‘I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury’ again,’ says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. ‘The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.’

“Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as ‘Peanuts,’ which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and ‘Blondie,’ which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.

“As middle-of-the-road as ‘Blondie’ is, it’s surprising to learn that it has come to represent a divisive topic in the comic strip community. Young passed away in 1973, and since then ‘Blondie’ has been carried on by his son, Dean, and is known as an example of a ‘legacy’ strip.

“‘As an art form, comics are threatened by legacy strips,’ Breathed says. ‘The fact that papers are running [legacy strips] throughout the country is a sign that they’re desperate to cling to the readers they think they need, and they’re afraid to take risks and find the new talent.’


To complete the vicious cycle, syndicates gauge the timidity of newspaper editors, and as a result, choose only the blandest offerings to syndicate.

That means even the bravest newspaper editor has a watered-down selection to choose from if he or she actually wants to find some new talent for the comics page.

In response, Denise Joyce, president of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, “says that while comics are not the huge player they used to be 20 or 30 years ago, they are definitely on the minds of features editors.”

“Regarding legacy strips, Joyce admits it’s difficult to replace them without making their fans angry. As a compromise, Joyce says her paper is running some comics online and Web-linking to others.


Of course, once their newspaper readers discover comics published on the Web, they’re bound to discover a much wider world of comics that aren’t available in their newspapers, aren’t they? Comics that are neither watered-down nor timid.

So, in a way, people like me are indebted to the myopia of people like Ms. Joyce.

You keep sending them, Ms. Joyce, and I’ll keep keeping them.

Read the whole story.