My current comic agenda..
Here lately I’ve been making panels specifically to use on new character pages that I’ll create sometime in the future. The current character pages feel a little out of date, and I want to scrap and rebuild that whole mess. Here now is a draft of the new “History” on the comic. I went back and did a forensic examination to find the actual dates that certain things occurred because the site before October 22, 2008 was deleted, and I have never found any backups.
A Brief History of the Comics and the Characters
So if you go back to Flush Twice’s “Old Testament” days, there were two nameless, faceless stick figures that showed up on Jan 11, 2004. A week later on Jan 18, I re-posted them, and started publishing daily panels thereafter. Thus began what was internally referred to as the “Stick Series”. I gave them faces on Feb 13th (stick0027), and their recognizable features solidified on the Jan 15, 2004 (stick0029), An old man named Ben showed up on Feb 21, 2004 (stick0035), and Brandon and Dewey got their names the next day (stick0036). I felt sorry for Dewey and on Apr 23 2004 (stick0097) I created Birdie to be his girlfriend. Newt and Clif showed up on May 12, 2004 (stick0116), with the introduction of Alexis the next day on May 13, 2004 (stick0117).
My home computer crashed after I had uploaded the 120th comic to the site. All of my original PNG files were lost, and I always resize my comics to smaller, lower quality JPG files when they get posted on the site. I was devastated by the loss of 4 months of work on the comic. Nevertheless, I persevered and rebuilt everything from the ashes, making sure to do it better this time around.
My first “hiatus” happened on August 24, 2004 after publishing 220 consecutive panels. Believe it or not I didn’t introduced Tyler until October 3, 2004 (stick0272). I started toying around with “fleshing out” the stick figures on Nov 5, 2004 (stick0274), and the new look became permanent on December 21, 2004 (stick0316). Toni rounded out the cast on December 30, 2004 (stick0325), and that about wrapped up the first year of my not so brief foray into comics.
Those were the original 9 characters. Brandon, Dewey, Ben, Birdie, Clif, Newt, Alexis, Tyler, and Toni.
In 2005 some of the updates became a bit sporadic. Of course Tyler’s character joined the Army in October of 2005, which is the same time that I did in real life. The comics and jokes became even more sporadically updated at that point with the “Stick Series” ending July 20, 2008.
On October 22, 2008 I deleted the original site and installed a content management system. This began the “f2x Series” of comics. During this time, I would add Sergeant Bromite on October 10, 2009. Updates on the site continued to be sporadic until late November 2013 when I began pumping out a couple weeks worth of comics before settling into publishing jokes every Monday through Friday. On March 8, 2014 I debuted 2 new characters dressed in Army fatigues. It would be another 7 months before I showed them along with two more soldiers on Oct 4, 2014. They would be further refined and named over several months to be known as Sergeant Bryan, Sergeant Scrapper, Specialist Brady, and Private Grouper.
Only one other named character has been added since then, and that’s Chef Jimmy DeMarde on October 31, 2015. That sporadic story arc lasted until March 5, 2016. While I never officially closed the “f2x Series”, I’ve never went back to it, and in spite of what I might have said at the time, there currently aren’t any plans to either.
And that brings us to the “Pathos Series” that began on May 13, 2016. At first I tried to make them daily like I used to in 2004, but the schedule was too demanding for me. The comics continued to be sporadic until Saturday Nov 5, 2016, and have appeared every Saturday since then (although not necessarily at midnight EST).
So there you have it. A brief synopsis of the past 13 years and 5 months that I have been making comics. I’ll also note that every panel and strip is still available on this site, no matter how embarrassingly bad some of them may be. Oh yeah… Some of them make me cringe hard. Some of them I like… But there are some on here that I just shake my head in shame over. WTF was I thinking?
I really hope you liked this history lessen. If you want, compare an contrast it with the current historical account that I wrote previously.
Pax,
-f2x
