There Comes A Time

and it's time for a break

FurBabies first appeared on GoComics on June 5, 2023.

Its last appearance, at least for the summer months, will be on June 28, 2026.

I genuinely need a break. I’ve been drawing FurBabies every day for the past three years, holidays included, with two weeks off, total. One of the weeks was spent at a professional convention. My second, a week in Newfoundland, provided me with a short story line about a Newfoundland dog but did not otherwise recharge the creative battery. While this doesn’t sound like much of a chore (“fun” cartooning jobs are rarely considered ‘jobs’ by non cartoonists) it would be a different story if I had started FurBabies in the last century or earlier in this one. Any year after 2020 was not a good time to start a new comic strip. Many Newspapers ceased publishing print editions and the remaining ones either take comics from specific lists or do not have them at all. I used to read every strip in the daily and Sunday paper, including ones that I did not like. They were from different syndicates. All had equal access to the viewer. This is no longer the case. Online comic sites, unlike newspaper comics, prioritize strips that tend to be older, with larger groups of followers. Without online publicity, a new online comic strip has no chance at growing readership. And if I spent as much time on social media promoting the strip as seems to be required, I would not have time to draw it. Age is a factor here.

We are also at the mercy of technology.

FurBabies regularly received up to 100 comments per day before the GoComics site was updated in March. This dropped to 60, then 20, per day, after the update.

Then the Comments app was ‘improved’.

On June 25, the day after the update, there were four comments, not including my own. The number of comments, page visits, and likes determine the royalty payments.

I have more followers on Substack than on GoComics. I have no way of knowing if there is any overlapping readership to GoComics from Substack or from Bluesky.

I’m not sure what to do with FurBabies. The book is not selling. I can’t get any of the local papers or book review sites to review it. Maybe I should just take the hint.

Maybe it’s just time for a very long vacation.

For now, I am taking a break from the strip and will decide what to do next after some time away. Here is the original ‘last strip’ drawn in 2023, (with the original character designs)

See you in the funny papers?