Oy - Celebrating ONE YEAR on the web!

Well, here we are: July 2nd, 2008! One year ago today I officially launched this site after months of research and preparation… not to mention a contractual obligation to my wife! A lot of things have changed, but one thing hasn’t, my determination to make this site something special and provide quality comics content.

I think what’s most amazing to me at this point, is that the original plan was to retool and relaunch my webcomic from 2004-05 titled “BarnRats” (so yeah, technically this is year FOUR if we call that 2+ year gap a “sabbatical”). But then I had other ideas for strip series in my head and I honestly couldn’t choose. And instead of building 5 different sites, I thought it would be a fun experiment to run 5 comics, one per weekday, all from the same site. One series I planned ended up being too ambitious for even a weekly update, so I scrapped it in favor of posting my older work from the original BarnRats run and my other work from the 90’s and early 2000’s, in all its amateur glory in a weekly update I dubbed “Retro Wednesdays”. This all got started with BarnRats still intended to be the flagship title.

Now, one year later, it’s all about Oy! I’ve actually been using Oy in some fashion for the last 15+ years; even going so far as trying to get him syndicated back in 2002. When I added him to theblogComics.com roster, I really had no intention of keeping him around. He was just a long-time buddy coming out of retirement for the ride until one of the other series took over. Instead, his personality seemed to register the best with readers and he waddled his way into the spotlight.

As if subconsciously knowing that Oy was becoming the main event, my enthusiasm for BarnRats, and my brand-new series Zap the Zero, waned fairly quickly and any new updates were canceled earlier this year.

I decided that I needed to distill this site to be Oy-centric, not only for ease of reading through the archive, but also marketing a singular series is a lot easier than explaining the concept of 5 strips on one site (in fact, I’ve already seen my readership jump significantly since I made the transition last month). But there was one anomaly still sailing around, my pirate-themed series The Crow’s Nest. I made The Crow’s Nest to be the epitome of a stereotypical webcomic: simply drawn, starring pirates and eventually ninjas and really simple, gag-a-day jokes.

Instead it became a storyline-driven series with characters that resonated with ME (not sure about everyone else). So I had to figure out what to do, and to borrow a Dilbert comic, now that I had everything centralized for efficiency, I needed to decentralize to create a better workflow….

1) theblogComics.com has become oycomics.com featuring Oy comics, and only Oy comics, in a new DAILY, 7 days per week, 365 days per year format.

2) The newer BarnRats and Zap the Zero archives are now at theblogComics.com - Oldies which will continue to run weekly Retro Wednesday updates for the next few years (yeah, I’ve got a huge pile of old work; the old BarnRats alone will last until next summer).

3) The Crow’s Nest now has its own site over at theblogComics.com - The Crow’s Nest

Beyond just the comics, simply on a whim, I also launched a podcast, “Sunday Funnies“, a show for discussing the comic strip art form, both syndicated and on the web. And thanks to the addition of Todd “togotoons” Dolce and my wife Charly, it has grown into something pretty great. The show just celebrated 11 episodes and 2 interviews with major cartoonists! With plenty more fun on the way!

It’s been a wonderful year of learning and making changes for the better, and I look forward to what this next year has in store now that the dust has settled.

Thank you to everyone who reads my comics, I honestly could not do this without your participation.

See you in the funny (web)pages!

~Danny Burleson - July 2, 2008

| Tags: NEWS (Comics), NEWS(Site)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.