Ridiculous Opinions #297
Hey, guess what! I did over 1000 Maurice the Beaver comic strips!
Did you know this? Probably not, other than the fact that I told you. And by the time you read this, I will have almost published all of them. I’m planning to do a “Last 30 Strips” celebration on the internet before I sign off on Maurice forever. And when I say forever, I mean that I plan to take them entirely off of the internet.
This is shocking to some, but not all. I’ve been grinding away at Maurice since 2019. Maurice began for a couple of reasons. One of those was to scratch that itch when it came to making comic strips again. I really enjoyed making TJHS 1987 and though it was time for it to end when it did, I still wanted to do more. Several years later, I created Maurice while sitting in a hotel in Los Angeles. I made the first strip about a week later and then just didn’t stop.
The other reason I wanted to create Maurice was for me to have a voice when it came to political commentary. As your average citizen, it can be hard to make a difference in the world. After three years of Trump idiocy, I thought it might be a good idea to make fun and that moron and his ilk. It was a small protest, but one that made me feel better about the world. I am not in a position where I can run down the street to protest, nor make any real challenges to the status quo. Art is the only way that I know how to do it.
So, I started doing Maurice comics to my audience of…nobody.
No one read the first 200 Maurice comics. I posted them on Instagram and though the format of Instagram seems like it’d be perfect for web comics, no audience showed up. Part of the reason is my fault. I refused to cater to the algorithm of Instagram, which meant that I didn’t follow anyone and never interacted. I just posted my comics there. I tried paying them for advertising a couple of times, but soon realized the scam that was.
But after the first 200, I changed the format to color comics and started posting in other places. For a while, it was Twitter, which also went nowhere because I didn’t cater to the algorithm. But then in 2021, I started posting on Reddit. At first, it was more crickets when it came to an audience, but eventually things took off.
When I joined Reddit, the r/comics subreddit was around a million people. Today, it’s 3.6 million people and growing. Maurice became successful because of that. He’s been seen by millions of people, which is hard to imagine. In fact, a couple of my single comic strips have 2.1 million views. That melts my brain.
Eventually, I started to whittle down my social media use and I slowly began to delete my presence from many different places. Twitter was the first to go (you can guess why). I deleted Instagram last year. I stopped posting on Tumblr and several other sites. Today, I post on Reddit, Webtoon, and Bluesky.
And when I finish my 1000th Maurice comic, I will delete my presence from the internet entirely. No more Reddit. No more Webtoon. And no more Bluesky.
And hopefully, my mind will be more clear when that happens.
It’s interesting to create something that has an impact on many, but so few at the same time. Creating 1000 individual comic strips is a big deal. But life carries on. I still teach every day. I still work for a living. Hollywood has not come calling to turn Maurice into a hit Netflix show (their loss) and no publisher is clamoring to publish the comics other than me. I’m working on some collected editions that are going to be great, but the truth of the matter is that Maurice has not really made any money for me, other than the occasional book sale. I DID make $450 when I ran my fake “Help Randall Retire” GoFundMe, but I put that back into the Sunday Comix newsletter hosting payments.
So why quit? For me, I’m just tired of the grind and want to do something else now. I have succeeded in my arbitrary goal. Hopefully, we can walk out of this with a bit of a celebration of the awesomeness of the comic. We’ll have some fun in these last few strips and then be done. When one looks back at the reasons I created Maurice, one of which was to create a long-running strip again. Mission accomplished.
The other was political commentary and well…it’s really hard to make fun of something as stupid as what exists today. I’ve made a couple of strips about how hard it is to make fun of the current administration. It’s beyond parody. And that isn’t funny anymore. Who knows where all this will lead? Making Maurice comics about the idiocy of the American government isn’t helping in the least and no one really seems to care. So, I’ll have to find other ways to offer commentary on the idiocy of the world in which we live. Who knows?
But for a while, I had something awesome going. And you’re more than welcome to join in on these last few comics. I’m going to try to post one each day for September, while a Kickstarter campaign runs at the same time, then so long, suckers! I’m moving on to other things. Maurice will exist solely in print and nowhere else.
And what’s after that?
The next long-term project I do is going to be HUGE…No more Maurice to distract me. Let’s see what happens…
