25 Years in Comics

A few happy memories to share on my silver anniversary

If you follow me on Bluesky, you know I’ve been sharing memories from my career in comics for the last 25 days, counting down to today. Here’s a look at all of them:

How it started…

Twenty-five years ago today, I posted my first comic on the Web. Greystone Inn first appeared on a GeoCities site on February 14, 2000.

On April 16, 2001, it began running in the Philadelphia Daily News. I self-syndicated the strip to other newspapers, and by 2008, I estimated that my comic was being seen by about 1.2 million readers a week.

Greystone Inn ran online Monday through Saturday until the end of June 2005. The next day, Evil Inc was launched.

At the beginning of 2016, the comic-strip format was retired in favor of a comic-book approach and the site began updating twice a week in half-page chunks.

The past 24 years have also seen the rise of some other projects I'm very proud of. Courting Disaster, a single-panel strip about sex and relationships was launched on Jan 12, 2005. It was originally created to accompany a sex-advice column that ran in the Philadelphia Daily News.

It ended in 2012 when I left that newspaper, but it was reinvented as Courting Disaster Uncensored, a NSFW feature available only to Patreon backers and in printed collections. Today, the general concept lives on — in the form of the bonus cartoons I post on Mondays.

Phables was a full-page comic about life in Philadelphia which started on Feb. 25, 2006. It was nominated for an Eisner Award for best webcomic the following year. It lost to an advertisement for a video game. I'm not making that up.

And, of course, Evil Inc After Dark, my first NSFW series, was launched officially in April 2015.

Along the way, there have been dozens of other projects I've been proud of — Webcomics.com, Arch Bros, Webcomics Weekly, Surviving Creativity, ComicLab, How to Make Webcomics, Webcomics Confidential, Tales from the Con, The Webcomics Handbook, The Everything Cartooning Book, Hey Comics — Kids!, teaching classes in both sequential art and entrepreneurship at Hussian College School of Art, teaching Storytelling and TV Story Analysis at University of the Arts, winning the award for Comic Book Writer of the Year at the Philadelphia Geek Awards in 2012, back-to-back nominations for Best Online Longform Comic from the National Cartoonists Society, and winning a ’Ringo Award…

Whew! It's been a busy 25 years!

And none of it would have been possible without your support — on my sites, at comic-convention appearances, and here on Substack. You folks have been with me every step of the way, and I couldn't be more grateful.