So, as many of you have heard a hundred billion times, I do a comic strip called Maurice the Beaver. I publish a new comic three to four times a week in various places on the internet, and when I get enough of them, I compile them into books. Up until a little while ago, very few people read my comics. That never stopped me from making them, and right now I’m up to around 460 and of them.

For the longest time, I was posting them on Instagram, but Instagram is such a crap platform that it was impossible to get traction there unless you paid them to advertise. Plus, Instagram changed to focus on Reels and I think video on the internet is stupid and makes people stupid (a diatribe for another newsletter, I think), so I gave up on Instagram.

All of this eventually led me to Reddit, so when I fired up the Maurice Machine again last spring, I thought I would try to post there. Lo and behold, suddenly I have an audience. My Reddit posts average between five and seven thousand viewers per comic. My highest post attracted 93,000 viewers. This week, I had 60,000 people look at one of my posts. That’s strange.

But there’s a larger question here: Why do I do this?