Ridiculous Opinions #217
So, as you may or may not know, I publish a comic regularly online called “Maurice the Beaver” (or “Maurice Comics”, as I have been calling it lately). I’ve been doing these comics for YEARS. Right now, I have published well-over six hundred of them and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon, because I quite enjoy making them.
For years and years, I posted them on Instagram and would whoop and holler if I get fifteen likes. I’m making it! I would think. People actually like me!
Basically, there was no audience for Maurice Comics.
But I kept going. And eventually, I branched out to other social networks. I posted for a while on Twitter until ELON bought it, and then I stopped going there. I tried some other social networks, but Maurice never really caught on. Then, I found Reddit.
I had always thought of Reddit as a cesspool of memes and angry people, but though that exists, it’s not the majority of users. Reddit has wonderful little communities of people who follow their own interests in places called subreddits. There is a Reddit thread called r/comics and a couple of years ago, I started posting my Maurice comics there.
Of course, I received the typical indifference of the internet and its algorithms. Twenty upvotes! Yay! As is usual, I throw my stuff out into the ether and see what sticks. Nothing was sticking. The algorithm doesn’t like me.
But around April, things started to pick up on Reddit. One comic got over 100 likes and I was happy. Then, those numbers started increasing and an odd circumstance occurred…a community was forming around Maurice Comics.
It was small at first, but has grown larger over time. And I began to look at the statistics for how many people read my comic. 20K one day. Wow! 50K on another day. Amazing!
Through the summer, however, the statistics kept climbing higher and higher. 100K views. 1000 upvotes. My biggest comic had 273K views and over 7000 upvotes. I get regular commenters for my comics as well, which is fun.
But I’m not here to brag. I’m here to talk about the weird things that happen when you put things out there on the internet…
About a month ago, some people began to pop up in the comments of my comic. They almost always had the same comment: “Holy sh*t, a talking beaver!” Because I try to respond to most commenters, I would usually reply with, “It’s true.”
But these comments started happening over and over, and I got a sneaking suspicion that I was missing out on the joke. Something was happening that I didn’t know about. I decided to investigate after someone posted a link in one of the comments. I found this:
What the hell was this? These weren’t my words! Someone had taken my comic, erased the words, and put their own words over the top. I realized that this was part of a subreddit called r/bonehurtingjuice, where the whole goal was to take the comics of others and add your own words. You weren’t allowed to change the art. You could only change the words. And one person in particular had been reposting Maurice comics for a while, followed by a few others.
It was bizarre. Some of the comics they wrote were funnier than the ones that were actually mine. The comments were just as strange. Several of the new comics were definitely NSFW, but there was nothing mean spirited about what they were doing. I soon realized that the term, “Holy sh*t, a talking beaver!” came from one of the r/bonehurtingjuice comics. And people were coming over from there to comment on the original comics.
Then, like all things on the internet, it died off a little bit. That particular subreddit could very well go south at a certain point, because one never knows when the trolls will venture in and turn everything to crap (example: The U.S. House of Representatives). But for a while, this was fun.
And it’s the same with my brief popularity with Maurice on the r/comics subreddit. I may continue to be mildly popular there. I may not. But it’s fun while it lasts, so I’m enjoying myself.
We shall see where this goes…
