Longtime readers of this page will recall that I never managed to record the actual day of launch; it was December 2005, there were test pieces in the pipe that got released after the fact which muddied the waters, and it was sometime before the 24th because that’s when the Wayback Machine¹ started tracking it.

So some time back I decided that the 15th of December would serve as the official birthday of Fleen, much like how all thoroughbred horses are considered to be born on 1 January regardless of their actual foaling date. The 15th was Sunday, and yesterday I was talking about Tom Spurgeon², so I’m a bit late, or maybe not. We’ll all find ways to cope, I’m certain.

It’s been a ride; at the time I started, Spurgeon had been running The Comics Reporter for a bit more than a year (11 October 2004 is the oldest date I can find via the Wayback Machine), and The Beat a little older (Heidi Mac launched in June of that year, although she didn’t host it herself until 2010, so who knows how much of the early years at comicon.com and Publishers Weekly still exist). CR stayed much the same, The Beat expanded into new areas of interest, with a rotating stable of writers and is maybe no properly described as bloggy any longer. Fleen started with me and Jeff Lowrey (who dropped out about 14 months later), and today it’s pretty much me and Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin when the BD scene needs discussing.

Through that time we’ve sometimes stretched the meaning of webcomics, at the same time lamenting the imprecision and general suckiness of the term. I’ve done some pieces that I’m really proud of, some that I banged out without much planning, a few I’d probably want to take down if I thought about it for a minute; to be honest, I’ve probably completely forgotten the vast majority of what I’ve written here.

When I hit publish, this will be the 3712th post to go out under my name in about 5110 days, which is close enough to 5 posts in 7 days as makes no difference. I’ve been threatened with a lawsuit by an alleged millionaire/artist³, been memorialized in comics, met heroes who’ve become friends, seen friends become household names, determined I have an Evil Twin, raised thousands of dollars for the disadvantaged and deserving, been informed that all of this will be included in the Library of Congress, and found my people.

So we’ll call today 14 years of what Rosenberg assured me would be 300 words a day, that’s nothing, that’s lunch blogging, a false promise for which I will surely extract my vengeance some day. I can’t say how much longer all of this will go on because who the hell knows how much longer anything goes on these days, but the Post-It with my to-do list for tomorrow includes Fleen as an action item. In the meantime, I’m glad to have you along for the ride.

Spam of the day:

Geschäftsnummer- EE 70/218. (Geschäftsnummer- EE 70/218.)

Nee, mach diesen Scheiß nicht.

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¹ Or, more precisely, the current iteration of Fleen. The name was chosen because Jon Rosenberg already owned the domain for the Fairly Large Electronic Entertainment Network, an early webcomic portal.

² Speaking of which, earlier today I learned that the image on yesterday’s post, the artwork produced for Spurgeon’s memorial, was by Julian Dassai (portrait), Laurenn McCubbin (color) and Emi Gennis (letters). The post has been updated to reflect this.

³ I leave it to you to decide if the individual actually deserves to be designated either a millionaire or an artist; I have my doubts about the former and absolutely none about the latter.