Debt On

That’s how many comics are in the archive, as of today. That’s 100 comics since the May 29 relaunch. For anyone relatively new to the site, here’s a quick rundown of the major storylines:

Old Skool
Can’t Pay the Water Bill
Bounty for President
Malthus the Squirrel
Republican National Convention
War on Weather
Malthus and Bounty

Fresh:
Graduation
Keg Party
Student Loans and Lying on Resume
Mall-Mart
Hording Oil
Too Much TV
Root Canal

Oh, and sorry for the quiet blog lately. I screwed up the software a little bit so that it’s functional but hard to use. Go me. I so don’t have time to fix this. Comics are going just dandy, though.

VOTE DEBT ON HERE!!!

Looking through the archives over at the Comics Curmugeon, I found an article where he talked about the problems with Doonesbury’s handling of young people. His was quite a bit more insightful than the paragraph I recently wrote on the same subject.

The Curmudgeon is a great site that everybody should be checking out anyway. It’s like reading the comics page, except with real jokes. Take today’s edition, first he points out how poorly the Middle Eastern set Crock has coped with its setting being the center of world events. Until now, I thought that Beetle Bailey had the most oddly out of place setting, as Beetle loafed around in boot camp and none of his buddies ever got sent to Iraq. (Come to think of it, he did the same thing during Vietnam…)

For anybody that’s paying attention, today’s strip marks 50 since I relaunched the strip on May 29. In a few days, there’ll be 150 comics in the archive.

I unearthed these… classic Debt On strips from before I even put it on the web. I ended up cutting them from the first run because… well, they suck. Or they just didn’t fit into where I was going with the strip. Anyway, I present them here for the perusal of those brave enough to bear my artwork.

Daaaaamn! What other site is giving you this much comic for your Sunday?

I think today’s strip is particularly funny because “storming the shores” of Finland would require the U.S. to sail through a very tight cluster of islands between Denmark and Sweden and into the Baltic Sea. The truth is it would be much easier for the United States to first take Norway and Sweden or to recruit them as allies. Then again, well-laid plans is not the Pentagon’s strongest attribute. (That would be the guns. The BIG BIG guns.)

Garry Trudeau really can’t write for young people. It’s a problem I’ve been noticing for a while, they’re all completely unbelievable. One just lost his job in the CIA, another has schools like MIT and Harvard fighting for her. And they use words like Dick Cheney and negligee in the same sentence. I relate better to Duke than these people.

I thought Walden wasn’t a good school anymore? Where’s the shift to the service sector? Or the declining job market?

Uh.. yeah.. so I won Webcomics in Print’s send in your picture wearing a webcomic t-shirt contest. They apparently liked that I gave the only shirt I made to a friend to apologize for basing the character Bounty on him. He probably deserves more than a t-shirt…

And a big welcome to all the new readers: June has been by far the best month ever in two years of running this site. I won’t put a pathetically low number on it, so let’s just say that I’m glad you’re all here.

And were you inclined to help out with the site a little, there’s a few ways you could do so. A very easy way is to vote for Debt On at theWebcomicList or here: or here

Also there are a few text ads running down the side of the blog and clicking those may someday help me. (The ads aren’t bad, really. I’ve been checking things out and found myself clicking my own ads because I thought they were interesting. Seriously. Check it out.)

If you really like the strip, a better way to help out would be to make a Paypal donation via the button that looks like this:

Otherwise, I may have to get more ads. Yuck. Cartooning is an enormous sinkhole for money.

Also, I urge everyone to check out my ever-expanding links page. Recent additions include the awesome comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and new political video blog Crooks and Liars which seems to have a taste for the random freaking incredible live performance by the likes of Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. Not to be missed.

Hey just a reminder that these are brand new comics you’re looking at on the site as of Monday. Daily comics will continue here indefinitely.

I’ve endeavored to make the new strips as easy to follow as possible. They are conceptually the same as the old ones but this is a relaunch in every sense of the word: I will reintroduce the major characters and situations, and little reference will be made to events of previous strips. After all, this is a comic strip so continuity is of little real concern. ;)

Still, if you want to get caught up on who the major characters are I’ve made this little guide in the Who’s Who section of the site.

Finally, if you have an RSS reader and you want to keep caught up on the comics the RSS feed will leave a hotlink to the latest comic in your reader every day.

And I know lots of you have mailing lists and blogs and whatever, so c’mon! Show me some love out there!

Oh and they’ll let just about anybody on mySpace these days.

Via Comixpedia an LA Times article about the impending demise of newspaper cartooning features this quote from “Cathy” creator Cathy Guisewite:

“To me a strip should run forever because it’s a classic. They have meaning to me, and no new newspaper strip is going to earn that place in my heart.

“I love the old strips, I love the old characters, and I know as I say that, that’s what’s preventing new strips from coming in because there’s only so much space and newspapers have to drop a beloved strip to make room for a new one. [My solution] to that would be to devote more space to comic strips.”

Guisewite, whose garbage comic strip has been stinking up the comics page and breeding low self-esteem in working women for thirty years, is apparently hoping that after retirement someone can keep drawing her characters screaming “AAAAACK” for generations to come.

Meanwhile, newspapers keep hiring artists to draw tired old scenarios and keep driving jokes into the ground that were old fifty years ago.

UPDATE: Josh Reads, the Comics Curmudgeon expounds on the awfulness of some selected Cathy strips.