Today marks eighteen years of continuous comics for me. My cartooning career is old enough to legally get a tattoo. I launched my first comic, Greystone Inn, on February 14, 2000. Greystone ran six-days-a-week until June 21, 2005.
On April 16, 2001, Greystone Inn began running daily in the Philadelphia Daily News. Several other newspapers would run the strip over the years, but the Daily News ran it from the first Greystone strip to the last Evil Inc.
The day after Greystone Inn ended, Evil Inc was launched. The comic strip version of Evil Inc ran Monday-through-Saturday until the end of 2015. In January 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 18 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.
Courting Disaster 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 print collections.
Phables was a full-page comic about life in Philadelphia which started on Feb. 20, 2006.
Phables 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 was launched officially in April 2015. The first print collection was successfully Kickstarted last summer, and hits bookstores and comic shops in May.
Along the way, there have been dozens of other projects I’ve been proud of, including…
- Webcomics.com
- Arch Bros
- Webcomics Weekly
- Surviving Creativity
- ComicLab
- How to Make Webcomics
- The Webcomics Handbook
- The Everything Cartooning Book
- Hey Comics — Kids!
- Teaching sequential art and entrepreneurship at Hussian College School of Art
- Winning the award for Comic Book Artist of the Year at the Philadelphia Geek Awards in 2012
— Whew! It’s been a busy 18 years.
And none of it would have been possible without your support — on my sites, at comic-convention appearances and here on Patreon. You folks have been with me every step of the way, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
Thanks for the last 18.
And here’s to the next 18.