Two Year Anniversary

See them in the funny papers on odd days. And the days are very odd.

Second anniversary strip, June 5, 2025.

Yogi Berra once ‘thanked everyone who made this day necessary’. I’d like to thank all of the FurBabies comic readers, some of whom have followed the strip since the beginning in 2023. I am glad that you get some enjoyment out of what Gioachino Rossini called ‘the sins of old age’.

The first FurBabies strip was drawn on January 3, 2023 and published on June 5, 2023.

One of Rossini’s Sins of Old Age.

Big changes were made to the new GoComics site, none of them advantageous to my comic. The new format no longer calculates a strip’s followers until the number changes by 100. This means little to older strips with thousands of followers but is immensely discouraging to the younger, smaller strips with smaller fanbases. In my case it means I won’t see a change until the end of the year, or possibly the middle of next year. This is not about money. It was very encouraging to see that the strip was attracting new viewers.

The ‘try something new’ feature on the landing page was removed and replaced with Nostalgia for Eighties Comics. FurBabies readership was growing when ‘try something new’ was active. Now, I have no idea what is happening.

FurBabies wasn’t included in a recent landing page update featuring Strips about Dogs. Three of the main characters are canines.

Comic strips have few publication outlets. Newspapers rarely take new strips (there are a few exceptions but few are dailies). Graphic novels are the hot item now, and some people advised me to drop the strip and take that route.

I prefer to use the short form for the same reason that I believe that most animated short films are superior to most animated features.

First anniversary strip excerpt, June 5, 2024.

The past year has been very stressful, with many outside events affecting my ability to draw a daily comic. FurBabies is too young to run repeats for months as some other comics do, and the characters have changed tremendously in design and personality since 2023. I used all the strips that could be repeated. Longer story lines from 2024 can’t be repeated at all. I found a workable solution for now by uploading new strips only on odd days, and using ‘bridging’ black and white strips on even days. The technique is based partly on Walt Kelly’s little character sketches appearing outside the strip format between story lines in his POGO collections, and partly on Ruben Bolling’s secondary comic that repeated the same ‘final’ strip for seven years. (Bolling’s other strip, TOM THE DANCING BUG, is one of my favorites.)

I’ll see if I can return to a daily update when and if my circumstances improve. Thank you for your understanding and thank you for reading FurBabies.

Enjoy.

best wishes

Nancy Beiman