Historically Speaking

Flush2x.com was registered in early May of 2003. Shortly after, I registered FlushTwice.com as well since that was exactly how I phonetically pronounced flush2x in the first place.

The main reason why I registered flush2x.com was because it was shorter, and I thought the whole flush2x thing would be this cool edgy thing that would catch on. It didn’t, so now it’s just FlushTwice.com, and by now I should hope that everyone is over it.

Originally, the website was centered around the jokes that were being forwarded to me by my friends. The idea was that there was so much shit in my daily e-mail that you’d have to flush twice to get it all down the sewer pipe.

I copy-pasted text strait out of the e-mails onto the webpage. It looked rather dull, so I started to throw in the funny pictures I had been forwarded as well. Google’s search engine fell in love with those images, and before long Flush Twice was the #1 search result for the “bigass.jpg” among others.

Google was good to me, and the amount of traffic sent to flush2x.com was was amazing. I imagine part of the reason flush2x was ranked so high was because I kept my HTML simplistic and there wasn’t any advertising.  There weren’t as many websites back then either, so that helped too.

In its heyday, Flush Twice was getting 7000 hits every day while being hosted on a computer in my basement.

 

I suspect another reason I had so many hits was because I posted a lot on forums like “Slashdot”. I’d put a link to  flush2x.com in my signature line as well as posting it next to my username. My comments were usually popular, and were frequently modded up.

So let’s get back to those funny images I was posting: It dawned on me that there might be some “intellectual property” issues by including those pictures on the site. I didn’t know where they came from or who might have actually owned them. I was becoming increasingly paranoid from reading the horror stories about lawsuits and websites being taken down. I didn’t want to risk getting sued for copyright infringement, but removing the images would make the site look exceedingly dull. The answer of course was to create my own original images. I wasn’t quite sure how I would do that.

One day, I made a wisecrack about replacing the pictures with stick figures in my blog, and that made my friend Darin laugh. A couple of weeks later, my paranoia had really started to sink in, and I decided to just do it. I was determined to make a daily panel comic featuring stick figures, and it wouldn’t matter if they were funny or not.

The Flush Twice comic was born on Sunday, January 11, 2004. It went daily one week later.

There were probably fewer than 2000 webcomics in 2004, and most of them were pretty obscure. For the most part, I didn’t know about them. I wasn’t trying to make it big on the webcomic scene, I just wanted to offer people something to look at besides sans serif font. It would be several months after I created my own comic before I realized that webcomics were even a “thing“.

After I realized what I’d actually made, I started hanging out in webcomic circles as if I actually knew something about this sort of thing. I was just making it up as I went along. If I hurt anyone’s feelings along the way, I do apologize. I was a bit of a bore back then. I’m a bit wiser now, and a little bit ashamed.

After all this time, I can still say that my character style is quite unique when compared with anything else out there. No one made stick figures quite like I did, and to this day, no one else has characters that look like mine do. I feel fairly confident that Flush Twice is original, and I suppose I can be somewhat proud of that.

To be honest, I felt the quality of my comics was dreadful. The color saturation was excessive, the images were grainy and pixelated, and the characters looked like bad Egyptian hieroglyphics. Once I realized that Comic Sans was particularly ridiculed, I created an original font that was regrettably hard to read. Completely ignoring the fact that the writing wasn’t the best; the art was embarrassingly bad.

Nevertheless, I have continued to work on improving my comic. You might have noticed the font has improved, the  characters have hands, backgrounds are 3D modeled, and there are several subtle refinements in the character’s appearance. While I don’t think they look good enough to show them to my own mother (rest her soul), they do look a hell of a lot better today.

Improving the quality came at a price, however. The bitmap editing abandonware I’m using dates back to 1997, and I am by no means proficient enough to use modern software like Photoshop or Gimp. There are many steps I take to make the characters now, and it takes a lot longer than it used to. This is OK, because I think I’m happier with quality over quantity.

While I cannot pretend that Flush Twice should be in the top 500 webcomics, nor would it even be worthy of the top 1000, Flush Twice does have a history, and I’d like to get credit for staying in the game.

In any event, I want to thank you for visiting my site and for taking the time to read all this. Hopefully you’ll like what you see enough to come back, and hopefully I’ll have something new up here for you to see as well.

Pax,

f2x

Creator and Author of Flush Twice

To contact me, you may e-mail me: flush2x@gmail.com

Last revised on June 20, 2015. Corrected formatting issues on December 10, 2018

Comments are closed.