Missed it in my trawl yesterday, only found it in clearing out RSS entries, and it would have been perfect in my discussion of longevity and migrating to webcomicking:

Fifteen years ago today Help Desk was born. To be more specific, on March 31, 1996, Help Desk debuted in OS/2 e-Zine!, a web magazine covering the OS/2 operating system.

A’course, Christopher Wright had a bit of a different journey than Larry Lewis, and there have been lengthy hiatuses (hiatii?) but still … fifteen years. That’s a long damn time. and Wright and Lewis probably have a lot more in common than they have different:

I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to do this for as long as I have. The last few years haven’t been particularly easy for me, or for this comic. This is an out-of-pocket venture—at best, revenue generated from banner ads offsets my server fees, more commonly it simply mitigates them, and I operate at a loss—and as I’ve mentioned before there are risks associated with working this way. That said, the advantage is that I’ve had the freedom to pursue this comic and my additional projects exactly the way I wanted to, and how many people can actually say that about anything in their lives?

Wright concludes with a list of goals, and I must draw your attention to one of them, because I think it neatly encompasses the feelings of not just webcomickers, not just creative types, but of everybody. It’s a universal desire, and one that I’m pretty sure Wright will make good on, and sooner rather than later:

Show them. Show them all.

Feel free to insert maniacal laughter, and join me in congratulating Christopher Wright on fifteen years.

Also, it’s on pretty serious hiatus right now, but today marks fourteen years of Goats. The art started, um, a trifle rough, but it got much better pretty quickly. I don’t know when Rosenberg will have the time to get back to Goats (there’s some family health issues that should resolve themselves in the coming weeks¹), but that’s okay.

In the fourteen years since comic-Jon and comic-Phillip started their comic-love affair with slackery and beer (real-Jon and real-Phillip, naturally, were well established in those patterns years prior), Rosenberg started and finished multiple other webcomics (look up Patent Pending or Worlds of Peril via the Wayback Machine, or browse through the MEGAGAMERZ 3133t archives, or enjoy the funky-fresh Scenes From A Multiverse), and continues to have more ideas per second squared than any three other people you’ve ever heard of².

Jon’s also the reason you’re reading this — he was the one that prompted me to take on the writing/editing duties here at Fleen, and it’s because of his introductions that I’ve met so many of the best, most creative, and generally wonderful people in the world. So if you’ve ever found anything I’ve ever written here to be even slightly of interest, he is a big part of why. Do me a favor and give @jonrosenberg a little love³, hey?

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¹ Go, Team Babies!
² Except for Rich Stevens; dude’s a caffeine-fueled idea machine with no off switch.
³ Also, expect him to freak out slightly if you tell him that I told you to give him some love. Despite our history, I’m not allowed to touch him; long story.