Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

Like all right-thinking people, I find David Morgan-Mar’s Irregular Webcomic to be an indispensible part of my day. The fact that he has to construct and photograph LEGO®™©^etc brand building-block play-sets to build his comic is astonishing to me. The lengths he will go to in order to indulge a pun are legendary. His resemblance to Mr Bean is striking. And his comments on everything under the sun (but most satisfyingly for me, physics) are worth the price of admission themselves.

Today, Morgan-Mar hit 2000 updates. Not content to note the significance of the achievement (which requires nearly five and half years of daily updating, considerably longer if you’re going with the more common three or five updates per week), he did some poking around and tried to determine how many webcomics have actually hit the 2K mark. His answer: 17 (to my eye, a fairly complete list, although he missed Sheldon, which passed the mark last October). Round it up for experimental error and oversights, and you’ve still got fewer than two dozen.

To put that into perspective, I can only think of one undertaking with a membership as exclusive as that (and accomplished in such a short time frame, seeing as how the internet as we now experience it is less than twenty years old): two dozen people have broken Earth orbit and been to the vicinity of the Moon (yes, yes, I know — only twelve of them landed and walked around, but if you achieve lunar orbit you’ve been to the Moon, goddammit).

Do I exaggerate? Indulge me, because exaggeration doesn’t change the fact that unlike the others on the list, Morgan-Mar doesn’t make comics his primary gig. Doctor Morgan-Mar works full time on image processing research (having done a bit in my own undergrad days, I can tell you it’s a facinating and challenging field that sucks in smart people and breaks all but the smartest), making Irregular Webcomic (and Darths & Droids, and Infinity on 30 Credits a Day) hobbies.

If you heard the latest Webcomics Weekly podcast (#41, for those playing at home), there was a question in the second half of the show to the effect of, If you could do your webcomic with no commercial pressures, no worries about it being your source of income, how would it be different? The guys looked at it as an unexpected question, seeing things like marketing and merchandising not as chores, but as lenses to focus their art and ability to touch readers. I read the question a bit differently — With respect to your webcomic, if you had a million dollars, what would you do?

The answer isn’t Two chicks at the same time, it’s what Morgan-Mar has done: create simply for the joy of creating (and educating, and inflicting really bad puns). The LEGO®™©^etc brand building blocks? They’re just a bonus.

I think, when I hit 2000 (11/10/09), instead of writing my own newspost I’m going to link to his today.

Ok, I must be counting wrong. I just did a quick tally of all my comics, subtracting 40 for guest comics and whatever detritus that equally counts for that (because I honestly couldn’t tell you what the real number is)… and I come up with 1797.

All things being equal, I’m going to hit the magic 2000 at some point early in 2009.

Wow?

Congratulations in advance, Liz. Efforts like yours are why we should a) return to the moon; and b) not forget the chicks this time.

TK Dye’s Newshounds too, which comes to about 2200 strips. (including the current “sequel” and a couple of side-sequences).

[…] noted on a previous occasion, Morgan-Mar is that rarest of creatures — the pro-grade amateur in the world of webcomics, […]

[…] looks fairly definitive) on long-running webcomics. I recommend it to you as a final settling on the question raised last July regarding How many webcomics have hit x strips? While there are probably webcomics that should be […]

[…] missed about what? Two updates in the past eight-plus years? Something like that. As noted 1000 days ago, Dr Morgan Mar was in a fairly exclusive siblinghood of about two dozen creators, and is now in a […]

[…] to hit the Big Round Number of 2000 on Friday. As we all know, 2000 updates is the number that separates the adults from the children, and if there are a few more comics to have hit that threshold than back in 2008, it’s still […]

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Irregular Webcomic, You Are Go For TLI

Contact Us

Archives

Search

A Good Start