Posts Tagged ‘anniversary’
12 items.
I thought it was worth it to mention that today marks the one-month anniversary of Theater Hopper. It may not seem like much of a milestone, but I’m partial to such occasions.
With only 12 strips under my belt, I consider it a freakin’ phenomenon that the site has accumulated over 1,700 unique hits and nearly 4,400 page views. This may seem like small potatoes to some people, but it means a lot to me.
I wouldn’t have gotten this far without the help of other cartoonists in the community. There are too many names to mention, but if you head over to the links page, those are the strips you should be visiting on a daily basis.
Thanks also to the readers who visit the site and keep coming back. Hopefully I will be able to provide the kind of content you like and look forward to reading.
That’s probably enough gushing for now, but I had to let it be known. I’m having too much fun doing this not to say thanks every once in a while.
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Aug27
THIS IS AS WILD AS WE GET ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT
August 27th, 2003 |
(1 votes, average: 7.00 out of 10)
There’s been a lot of fuss made about the 25th anniversary of Animal House – commemorated this week with a new Dolby-quality output of the seminal 1978 gross-out comedy on DVD this last Tuesday.
I admire Animal House less for what it is and more for the path it paved. Up until that point, erection jokes really weren’t getting their play in American cinema. It just goes to show, all of the most awesome movies were made in the 1970’s.
I was thinking about Animal House and its level of raunchiness. Not only the “gross-out” stuff, but the general sneering attitude toward women and minorities. I sincerely doubt the movie would ever be made in these P.C. times.
I was never in a fraternity in college. Blissfully, my alma mater was host to a fairly anemic Greek system. But my Dad was a frat guy and he swears by Animal House. It’s probably his favorite movie. He loves to tell me stories about initiation pranks where they would cover a banana in chunky peanut butter, drop it in a toilet and force blindfolded pledges to retrieve it. That’s exactly the level of sophomoric hi-jinks Animal House pitches. I find it more roguishly charming than truly outrageous. Almost cute.
If you compare hazing rituals like that one to the 24-hour keg stand most fraternities pass off as tradition these days, it makes me think my Dad rode the crest of the wave. I envy him in that respect.
Why such a goofball movie makes me think these things is beyond me. But it must have something to do with the enduring legacy of the film. Thanks to Animal House, every college guys aims for a similar experience…
…or at least wish they had.
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Just thought I would mention that fellow Dayfree Press member White Ninja Comics are celebrating their one year anniversary today.
If you haven’t seen their particular brand of surreal comedy, now’s a great time to investigate. Their latest strip – “White Ninja gets a kiwi” – is a shining example of their inspired, bizarre, but ultimately charming sense of humor.
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Nov14
In case you’re not grabbing the reference in today’s comic, I’m spoofing Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
[There was more to this blog post because I believe this was my 200th comic, but data was lost when we moved the site into WordPress in Jan. 2009 – Tom]
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While I was mentioning anniversaries in Wednesday’s blog, someone pointed out to me one that I missed. Taking the Bi-Pass recently celebrated it’s 100th strip, and I feel like a jerk for leaving them out because Dave is a friend of the site. He’s done guest strips for us and is an all-around rockin’ Canadian. Wish him well on his accomplishment!
And while we’re still on the subject of anniversaries, I thought I would mention that today is the 4 year anniversary of my marriage with Cami. I can’t believe it’s been 4 years. It certainly hasn’t felt that long.
We’re keeping our celebrations simple for tonight. A quiet dinner for two, staring into each other’s eyes and whatnot. The real celebration comes 3 weeks from now when we go to Las Vegas – our anniversary gift to each other.
I love you, Cami!
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Something that I forgot to mention yesterday was that our online community – that place we lovingly refer to as the THorum – celebrated its one year anniversary yesterday. Finally, I fell like we’re over the hump when it comes to providing a place for Theater Hopper fans to communicate with one another.
The history of the THorum is a long and complicated one. Marred by gross ineptitude on my part, this is actually the third incarnation of the community. Those who have been with me from the start know the story I am about to tell.
When I started Theater Hopper in August of 2002, one of the first things I made sure to have was a forum. I believed strongly that developing a community was key to getting the site off the ground. Initial fans would congregate and then spread word of Theater Hopper to all corners of the internet.
When only 20 or so people signed up after 3 months online, I grew impatient and shut it down.
Hey, don’t blame me! I’m a moron, remember? I was totally naive to the fact that having 500 unique visitors per month wouldn’t necessarily translate into an online community. Remember, I’m the same guy who tried raking in donations and advertisements when I was barely a blip on the radar screen. At that time, Theater Hopper was a pimple on the ass of web comics. I’m happy to say we’ve since moved up to “boil” status.
About 6 months after voluntarily closing the first forum and steadily watching our readership grow, I decided to take another swing at establishing a community. Another forum was forged.
Things went well for a while. We had gathered a little clique and we were online without and problems for a good length of time. That is until a catastrophic server failure totally crippled the site. The database that ran the forum was lost and I nearly lost a year’s worth of blogs. Of course, like a fool, I had never made a back-up of the forum. So it was gone, baby. REAL gone. Strike two in forum world.
Desperate to reconnect with the community that was lost, the third version of the forum was brought to life January 17, 2004 and we’ve been plugging along ever since.
It hasn’t been easy, though. Luckily with the help of my team of administrators and moderators, we’ve been able to keep it up and running without much data loss or obnoxious post whores ruining it for everyone. So my thanks to AdSquirrel, Brian, JClark and MadMup. You’re help has been invaluable.
In the course of our existence, we’ve even been able to implement custom features to make ours a totally unique environment. A web cam portal, The Friday Five, The Danza and The Urkle. Even our own dictionary – or THictionary for the unenlightened – of THorum-specific vernacular! Did you know we did a holiday gift exchange last Decemeber that went off with flying colors? We did, and it was great!
Now before you start thinking that the THorum is some sort of secret society or members only cabal, know that there has never been a more welcoming group of people online ANYWHERE. Friendly and bright. Gracious and insightful. And several of them more hilarious than anyone you will ever meet. My thanks to these THorumites who make our community one that I have looked forward to posting to every day since its inception. Thank you.
If you think that sounds good, sign up in the THorum today. You won’t be sorry.
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I just wanted to take a moment and send my sincere thoughts out to my good friend Zach Miller in acknowledgement of his first anniversary with Joe and Monkey.
Zach has been kicking ass this year, holding fast and true to his insane schedule of a new comic every day of the week. He’s managed to balance his workload and continue to pump out quality strips. His art has improved and his writing is better than ever.
This is no small task.
I remember when there would sometimes be months between updates back when he was doing No Pants Tuesday and how upset I would get about it. I loved that comic almost as much as I love Joe and Monkey. It angered me that I had to wait so long between comics.
Zach, consider yourself absolved!
Zach has been working on a book that collects the first year of Joe and Monkey and it will get its d…
* THE REST OF THIS POST WAS LOST WHEN THEATER HOPPER MOVED TO WORDPRESS IN 2009 *
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Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and before I partake in the libations that will help to wash away what was 2005, I like to take a moment to look back, take stock and examine where things started and how they ended.
2005 was a difficult year for me in a lot of ways. Lots of personal stresses. Cami got a new job. We sold our first home and bought our second home. Moving… THAT’S never fun. I lost my Grandpa and tried to guide my family through the aftermath of that. Still have a few relatives in the hospital. Somewhere in there when I was stressed out to the point I was banging on the steering wheel in traffic (it happened!), I decided to make a change in my personal health, started working out and lost 25 pounds.
So, yeah… lots of personal change. So it feels good to have moved beyond it.
As far as the comic is concerned, I don’t know if I was as dedicated to it as I could have been this year. Looking back through the ’05 archives, I’ve had more guest strips this year than any other. And while I’m proud that Theater Hopper is at the level where there are enough readers and other creators aware of the comic to help support me through a rough patch… honestly, that shouldn’t be happening to that degree.
Then again, I only blew off two updates this year. One was because my monitor fried on me, and the other one was just this week because I was still coming down from Christmas. So that’s not bad!
2005 was a year for milestones. We celebrated our 400th comic, our 3rd year anniversary and our 500th comic. All big successes. Incidentally, our 400th comic was also the introduction of our first new character in a long time – Charlie. Which could be considered successful or unsuccessful depending on your level of patience for slowly-unfolding storylines…
In the spirit of further transition, 2005 was the year that Theater Hopper moved away from Dayfree Press – the web comic collective we helped to establish – and onto greener pastures with Boxcar Comics. As much as I learned from the Dayfree guys – and I respect all of them – I think the camaraderie I have at Boxcar is a little more tightly knit as I was already good friends with Zach, Mitch and Joe. So it was a pretty smooth transition. Incidentally, I had a blast with those three jokers at Wizard World Chicago this year and hope to do it again next year!
Probably our biggest success this year wasn’t even something I did. The proper accolades go to Dave Buist from Taking the Bi-Pass for helping get our content the most organized and efficient it’s ever been. And I mean EVER!
Dave devised a new archiving system for the comics and the blogs built off keywords. So now you guys can search for your favorite strips, characters and movie references with greater ease. This has been something I’ve wanted for A LONG time. Not only for you guys, but it was even getting hard for ME to find the comics I was looking for. And I created the dumb things.
But Dave took his work one step further by also developing our Movie Review Database – and application so brilliant, I’m still grinning over it’s potential. I haven’t talked about it in a while because I’m still adding to it all the time. New movies, images of posters, cast information, links to the Internet Movie Database, plot descriptions, the works.
The idea is amazingly simple. All you have to do is create an account through the THorum. One you’re logged in, you can search for any movie that you would like to comment on and leave your own review! How cool is that! Like I said, I’m adding movies all the time. Eventually, the hope is that you can leave your two cents on virtually every movie Theater Hopper has ever referenced! How many other web comics are doing that!
There’s still a few layout glitches in the database that Dave and I are working on. Cosmetic stuff. Nothing serious. The guts of this thing work like a charm and it’s all thanks to Dave’s expert code knowledge. Once again, Dave – thanks from the bottom of my heart!
I think 2006 is already shaping up to be a great year. With my personal trials out of the way, I have more time to dedicate myself to the comic and push some projects through that I’ve been wanting to accomplish for years. I’ve designed the initial layout of the FIRST THEATER HOPPER book which will collect the first 52 strips in one handy volume. Eventually there will be two more volumes and the entire set put together will represent the first year. I plan on producing books in a similar fashion for Year Two and Year Three.
It might sound odd to offer three volumes for the first year, but I’m going that route to help me keep costs down. When it’s all said and done, the individual books will only be $9.99. When compared to other web comic collections I’ve seen, that’s pretty cheap. I want to make sure you guys get a copy for yourselves because it’s going to look really nice. More news on that in the future.
In the meantime, I want to thank all of you for sticking around and making Theater Hopper the success that it is. I’m continuously humbled by your interest in my work and only want to bring you more and better work in the time ahead.
Happy New Year and best wishes to you and yours!
THANK YOU!
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A few things I forgot to mention in the first post:
- A few people were congratulating me last Friday for reaching my 700th comic. Actually, that was a typo because I accidentally counted Wendesday’s “Boo hoo! My computer is FUBAR!” messages as an comic. I’ve made the correct and TODAY’S comic is my 700th – which is mind-numbing to think about.
I think the last time I celebrated the number of comics I posted was 400 or probably 500. But anymore, I think I’m just into celebrating anniversaries. You’ll hear from me again about it on August 5.
- Don’t forget to call in and listen to The Triple Feature talkcast tonight at 9:00 PM CST over at Talkshoe. I pretty much plan on giving the floor to Joe to talk about Live Free or Die Hard because it sounds like he had a blast at that movie and I want him to tell us all about it.
We’ll probably be talking about Transformers, too – if you’re interested. Join in and talk to us live!
- It’s kind of a long story about how it came into my possession, but I’m auctioning off an 8GB iPhone on eBay and the auction ends around 10:00 PM tonight. So if you’re interested or know someone that might be interested, bid away!
For the love of God, PLEASE bid. The longer this thing stays in my house, the more I want to love it in unnatural ways.
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I thought black was supposed to be slimming. Dear Lord, someone remind me never to insert myself into my own comic ever again! I looked so much better when I pulled this stunt before back in 2004.
I wasn’t planning on doing anything special for Theater Hopper’s 7th anniversary. But when I found out that I had crossed the 1,000 comic milestone, I thought it made sense to announce both at the same time.
I had actually figured out that I had reached the milestone almost serendipitously. Back when the archive database was being managed by PHP, I knew exactly how many comics were in the archive. It even went so far as to exclude guest comics, movie reviews and other “tagged” entries from the complete tally.
However, since moving the site into WordPress, I kind of lost track of how many comics there actually are on the site. I guess they don’t make a plugin for that.
Basically, I was sitting at my computer last week thinking about this and decided to do something about it. So I downloaded all of the comics in the archive and cherry picked all of the guest strips, movies reviews and other non-comic graphic entries from the folder.
Lo and behold, it was actually last Wednesday’s comic was our 1,000th! Since there was nothing particularly special about that comic, I decided to bide my time a little bit and come ‘atcha with a proper acknowledgment.
And here we are!
I think you guys know what is coming next. I don’t mean to preface that in a way that makes it sound trite, but what I’m about to say next I say a lot. Because it’s true.
I simply couldn’t do this comic without you. I’m amazed that anyone is still interested in what I’m doing 7 years and 1,000 comics later. Some of you have been with me since the beginning. Some of you are just learning about Theater Hopper. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read every comic in the archive or just a handful. Every, single one of you have contributed to the success of Theater Hopper and I thank you for it. You are amazing.
If you have it in your heart, I’d really like to raise the roof on crossing this milestone and promoting it as far and wide into the internet as possible.
Please let as many people as possible know about Theater Hopper’s anniversary and 1,000th comic. Use Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg… whatever you use and spread the word.
Let the guys at Fleen and Comixpedia know what’s going on. Say something about it in your LiveJournal or in a forum you visit. Anywhere else you happen to frequent, let them know about what’s going on here.
I don’t promote myself quite as much as I used to (or probably should), but this is a moment where I want to set aside modesty and invite as many people as possible to check out Theater Hopper so they don’t miss the next 1,000 comics!
Thanks again for everything you do and be sure to check the site later today for a couple more announcements. I have a few special treats up my sleeve!
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