I got an email t’other day, one that I can’t say I ever expected to receive. It’s worth quoting in full:

This coming Friday, February 28th, marks fifteen years of the venerable Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. Michael H. Payne’s Daily Grind and my own TRU-Life Adventures are still updating every weekday. Thought it might make a nice bullet point for you, maybe down in Spam of the Day.

That from Andrew Rothery, and therein, friends, lies a tale. If you’re new around here, you may not recall the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, a thing so old that its website has long since lapsed and been staked out by domain squatters¹. A thing so old that our first, offhand mention was in 2007, when it was assumed anybody reading this page would just know what we meant. Since that was a long damn time ago, let us recap:

In February of 2005, the denizens of a message board decided to see who could maintain a Mon-Fri daily webcomic schedule longest. There were rules: No posting of sketches, two panels minimum (but you could do a single-panel update every ten strips), your update must go up by midnight PST, and if your hosting went down you had to post somewhere by deadline and let people know where to find it. The contest would start 28 Feb 2005, it cost US$20 to buy in, and the last person standing got the pot, which amounted to US$112 (next to last would get the money raised from site ads, last thought to be about US$135).

There were names that you’d recognize in there: Natasha Allegri, Jennie Breeden, Tom McHenry, Scott Kurtz, John Campbell², Phil McAndrew. People that were prominent webcomickers and then weren’t and then were again: Steve Troop, Greg Dean, DJ Coffman. Ed Brisson, who is writing at half the comic book publishers, was one of the referees. Ali Graham does media marketing now; Dean Trippe teaches kids how to make comics.

By the time this blog started, half the field had been eliminated; heck, even Chris Crosby, who is presently on year twenty one of Superosity, was out by November of 2005. Seven remained at the five year mark; there were only three remaining at the end of 2014 (among them the very sexy Brad Guigar³) and only two on the 10th anniversary (Guigar ran three days worth of single panels close out the old year and ring in the new).

And there they have sat for the past five years: Payne and Rothery, here on the last day of Year Fifteen, ready for the first day of Year Sixteen tomorrow, continuing on out os a sense of pride and sheer cussedness. At this pint, I imagine it’ll be one of the two claiming the big purse and the estate of the other getting the small purse. Or, alternately, they both decide to celebrate having reached the milestone by getting blind drunk tonight, and both accidentally sleep through updating tomorrow, leading to a dual disqualification; after all, you can’t spell irony without Iron.

Spam of the day:

This coming Friday, February 28th, marks fifteen years of the venerable Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. Michael H. Payne’s Daily Grind and my own TRU-Life Adventures are still updating every weekday. Thought it might make a nice bullet point for you, maybe down in Spam of the Day.

We aim to please.

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¹ The oldest instance of which was April of last year with an asking price of US$1888. Today’s asking price has gone up to US$94,888 which seems a tad unrealistic.

² That’s a sad story, one of bad choices and brain chemistry gone wrong.

³ At the start of the IMDGC, you’d have been hard pressed to find a stronger advocate of regularity in posting schedule than Guigar. Take a listen to him on ComicLab these days, it’s the furthest thing from a priority for him. Time changes us all.