Web Comic 'Pokey The Penguin' Celebrates Its 19th Anniversary (twitter.com) 67
It's one of the longest-running comics on the internet. (Slashdot is approaching its 20th anniversary, and in its first year ran two stories about Pokey.) Open source developer Steve Havelka of Portland, Oregon created the truly bizarre strip back in 1998 -- one legend says it was originally a parody of another comic drawn with Microsoft Paint -- and he's since sporadically cranked out 637 strips.
Since 2010 he's also been publishing the cartoons in printed books, and this year launched an equally surreal page on Patreon identifying himself as "Steve Havelka, THE AUTHORS of Pokey the Penguin," offering supporters a "mystery item in the mail". Pokey has lots of fans -- he earned a shout-out in the videogame Hitman: Blood Money -- and very-long-time Slashdot reader 198348726583297634 informs us that on this 19th anniversary Pokey "is celebrating on Twitter!" where he's apparently accosting other web cartoonists and touting a new birthday strip. (Not to be confused with that truly horrible Pokey-goes-to-a-party movie created in Adobe Flash.)
I'd like to hear from any Slashdot readers who remember Pokey the Penguin -- but I'm also curious to hear from Slashdot readers who have never read the strip. ComixTalk called it "one of those webcomics that really only exist because of the Internet -- it would be hard to see something like this in any other medium... there's just something about Pokey the Penguin that fits online."
Since 2010 he's also been publishing the cartoons in printed books, and this year launched an equally surreal page on Patreon identifying himself as "Steve Havelka, THE AUTHORS of Pokey the Penguin," offering supporters a "mystery item in the mail". Pokey has lots of fans -- he earned a shout-out in the videogame Hitman: Blood Money -- and very-long-time Slashdot reader 198348726583297634 informs us that on this 19th anniversary Pokey "is celebrating on Twitter!" where he's apparently accosting other web cartoonists and touting a new birthday strip. (Not to be confused with that truly horrible Pokey-goes-to-a-party movie created in Adobe Flash.)
I'd like to hear from any Slashdot readers who remember Pokey the Penguin -- but I'm also curious to hear from Slashdot readers who have never read the strip. ComixTalk called it "one of those webcomics that really only exist because of the Internet -- it would be hard to see something like this in any other medium... there's just something about Pokey the Penguin that fits online."
Never heard of it... (Score:2)
User Friendly was my favorite back in the day, before it went into a permanent loop.
http://userfriendly.org/ [userfriendly.org]
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I would also point out that the old web comic I know about is I PhD, running since 1997 with almost 2000 strips.
I guess in this post factual world, no one will care.
My opinion is that since around 2000, it has been a renesance in newspaper style cartoons as the barriers to entry are non existent and for those who got in early, quality was all that mattere
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Schlock Mercenary has been running daily strips since June 2000. Never missed a single day in all that time.
600 strips in 20 years? Meh. Even 2,000 strips in those 20 years isn't that impressive.
6,000 strips in 16 years? That's impressive.
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That depends on whether the comics-every-single-day are worth viewing, or just tedious.
I've never heard of Schlock Mercenary before.
I know what schlock is.
Why not provide a link so we can see what sort of daily strip is provided?
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I followed it for a year or so, but it got old. Don't know what it's like in recent decades. Schlock is an alien with a number of useful talents, but beauty isn't one of them. There is (or was) also a handsome captain, a (slightly) mad scientist, a "beautiful" nurse, etc. And they get in a lot of fights. (I may have misremembered some of that.)
So it's pretty much a standard formula, but not too bad. https://www.schlockmercenary.c... [schlockmercenary.com] thanks to Google.
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Yeah, I miss it. Did they ever say why they stopped?
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User Friendly was my favorite back in the day, before it went into a permanent loop.
http://userfriendly.org/ [userfriendly.org]
Same here. I've never heard of Pokey the Penguin but I always enjoyed the User Friendly comic strip.
who have never read the strip (Score:1)
+1
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Dude, 1997 wasn't twenty years....
Damn I'm old.
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Scary, isn't it? Doesn't seem that long ago when I was dialing in.
The Playstation is 22 years old. The iPhone will be 10 in June and in some places you can't even use the original any more because there are no 2G networks left.
My beloved Amiga is 32 years old. 16 bit chipset with a CPU that was 32 bit internally. And I still remember the addresses of the customer registers, because back then for some reason we didn't even bother using #define for them. I guess we were used to low level monitors where you wo
Plenty of older (Score:2)
I'm sad that one of my favorites have come to an end. http://www.sabrina-online.com/ [sabrina-online.com] :)
First started in 1996 and only finished end 2017. With four-ish pages a month. (Archive: http://www.sabrina-online.com/... [sabrina-online.com] )
And for the geeks, it was and mostly is still done with an Amiga. Fans of the platform will know EWS's style.
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Found the b-tard.
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Surely you know about Pokey [wikipedia.org].
13 years on the net (Score:2)
http://twokinds.keenspot.com/ [keenspot.com]
Kat ^_^
Yellow No 5 (Score:2)
The thing I remember most about reading Pokey was a curious link [archive.org] on their page to a fictional band with a detailed history. I enjoyed the comic too and even made my own fan comics which I have somewhere. Good times.
Still love Pokey (Score:1)
Don't get it.... (Score:2)
I just read several of the strips over a wide range of years, and I just didn't get a single one of them. Maybe high art is just beyond me or something, but these didn't click with me at all. Not even a grin.
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I lol'd at a few of them. Some of it is very funny stuff.
I see why I've never heard of it (Score:1)
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So it's layers-deep ironic irony? Isn't that sort of ironic?
pokey at the jewelry store (Score:3)
pokey at the jewelry store [yellow5.com]
There. It's my favorite Pokey strip. It's also the only Pokey strip I like. I don't really get the love for Pokey... I don't get the love for Zippy the Pinhead either.
I really do like this one. The increasing aburdity of the situation unfolds with IMHO perfect comic timing.
With Jerkcity a close second (Score:2)
That's also been around for like 20 years now. Still publishing daily.
PHD Comic (Score:2)
As far as I remember, the oldest originally-web comic still running is Piled Higher and Deeper with October 27, 1997 launch.
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Kevin and Kell [kevinandkell.com] has been going since '95.
Bring back Badtech (Score:2)
By all the forgotten gods... (Score:2)
Sluggy Freelance (Score:1)
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Very very long time reader, I guess? (Score:2)
Being old can be useful, I guess, when ancient internet history comes up (yay, I'm a slashdot elder?). Sluggy Freelance was late in 96, and I think Help Desk (ubersoft) was earlier that same year. It's been published continuously although there're a few hiatus periods, so it may or may not count as prepaying sluggy.
JERK CITY (Score:1)
http://www.jerkcity.com 6,500+ of fully automated humor.
For those who don't get pokey: (Score:2)