Matter of Fact

September 29th marks a full year of updates for Matter of Fact. It has updated every day Monday through Friday for that entire year, plus a couple of bonus comics on Saturday every now and then. So after 265 comics, what happened this past year? Let’s take a gander shall we?

• September 29th, 2008. The first comic is posted (on Comic Sherpa, not on this site). This comic was just recently shown at our church as an example that related to the message. Due to my own fault, I did not get the email until late but if I had gotten it earlier I would have redrawn it in the new style.

• Sometime in October of 2008 I launched www.mofcomic.com. Everything before that was on Comic Sherpa. The site design was really sweet…if the site had launched in 1964.

• February 9th, 2009- The Record Setting Pancake comic is released. This has been my most controversial comic to date. Not the Hitler comic. Not the KKK comics. Not the one about gay ninjas. But pancakes. Pan…cakes…

• April 6th- My wife and I celebrate our one year anniversary. She rocks. I love her. She lets me dabble in this stuff and I really appreciate it.

• May 1st- My son, Jackson, was born. He is awesome. I love him.

• July 3rd- My 200th comic is posted. Act Like An Adult is also one of my favorites. I really like it.

• July 15th- My new style is launched with this comic. Again, this comic did not raise any controversy, but the Pancake comic did. Pan…cake… On another note I would like to say that in preparation for Jackson to be bron my goal was to try to get my buffer as big as possible. I knew that having him around would make it one million times harder to find time to draw. So if you notice from this blog post that I had at least a good 3 month buffer happening. I love my buffer a lot as it really makes me more relaxed about drawing my comic and giving me time to really develop ideas if I need that time. However, when I came up with that style change I had to look at 3 more months of comics in what I now consider the old crappy style, before you guys even saw what I had to anticipate.

• August 1st- my new website design is launched. My hope was to be able to do this at the same time as my drawing style change, but when you have a baby around the house you should just be happy that you have enough time to just eat.

• August 24th- My stepson, Daniel’s, first day of Kindergarten. He loves school and that is all him. He loves to learn and read and my wife and I couldn’t be happier about it. There is one downside, and that is that he usually likes to read books more in the style of kid’s encyclopedias as opposed to real stories. I don’t mean a downside for him but for my wife and I it really does bore us tremendously just spurting off facts about dinosaurs. FYI to parents- if you buy a dinosaur book for your child make sure it has pronunciations of the names!!!

• September 1st- my first merchandise began selling on the website. It is a calendar for band and choir teachers and includes 12 months of my music comics and also composers birth dates on the calendar. It was tons of fun putting together and gave me some good experience for when I put out the first Matter of Fact book.

So that is about it. Not much in terms of comics but my main goal this past year and this upcoming year was to get in the habit of creating comics and putting them out on time. Along the way so far there have been an incredible amount of people that have really helped me out. Without these guys I don’t think I would have been able to do what I was able to do:

• Scotty Shoemaker- back when I first started drawing these comics he unselfishly gave up some of his valued time to show me the ropes of photoshop and gave me some tips on creating good quality files. Check out his comic he is working on titles Marshmallow Robots. It looks freaking great.
• Andy Schwartz- he really helped me out with some of the computer stuff at the beginning in terms of coding and just little bits of information. I think I must have emailed him 1,253 times in a span of one week at one point. He eventually had my email reported as spam.
• Philip ‘Frumph’ Hofer- Without him, the new site design would not have been possible. I came up with the design but had no freaking idea of how to implement it. In stepped Phil. He was able to do things that I did not think were going to be possible. He rocks. He is responsible for a lot of the new stuff in the latest version of ComicPress. if you don’t use this, I highly recommend you do. It is amazing and has saved my butt in terms of time.
• These next few guys really helped me out with webcomics in general. Whenever I had a question for them they always responded with paragraphs of information. I consider them pillars of the webcomic community. Tony Piro of Calamities of Nature; Tom Dell’Aringa of Marooned; Brian Anderson of Dog Eat Doug; and Krishna Sadasivam of PC Weenies.
• You the reader. Without you guys it would make this job a lot more lonely. I am glad that every once in a great while that you find amusement in my little drawings and ideas. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, I will see you sticking around this upcoming year.

Thanks everyone!