Optipess

Well, I just had to blog about this: Apparently today, the first Monday in February, is in fact “National Sick Day” – the one day per year when the most employees call in sick for no good reason. Now, I had no knowledge of this day when I made today’s comic, so this definitely chalks up as a really weird coincidence! You can read more about the phenomenon here.

And to make matters even more uncanny, I seriously contemplated calling in sick to work today – as I felt pretty awful – but decided against it when I realized that I always do. Well, I guess that’s not really uncanny, just… sad.

Anyway, I hope you found this amusing as well, whether you’re at work or at home wrapped under a blanket watching Oprah reruns.

Indeed! The other day I posted the 100th Optipess comic, so I figured a retrospective look back on these first one hundred comic strips would be in order, complete with obscure trivia and insightful statistics. But actually, first off, Friday’s comic is not really the 100th comic I made – that honor goes to the page-sized sad tale of Duck Hunt, posted as the 83rd comic. This means I still have quite a few older “unpublished” Optipess comics lying around, but chances are these won’t be seeing the light of day, at least not posted as regular strips. Anyway, here are some tidbits of random information and useless trivia about Optipess’ humble beginnings, presented in a handy bullet-point list:

• The first 15 Optipess comics were made within a few weeks of spring 2007 to meet the deadline to a comic strip contest run by Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. Of these, only five have been posted on this site; Amazing Superpowers, Bomb Threats, An Epiphany, Stopwatch and The End.
• Optipess did not win the aforementioned contest or anything, but I was quite pleased to rank in the top 25. As a result of this a select few of my early strips were even featured in an art gallery exhibition during the summer of 2007.
• 44% of these first 100 strips featured someone dying. This proves that death is quite hilarious in most cases.
• 48% were pantomime, i.e. without speech bubbles. This is interesting to me since my very first strips were very focused on having text-boxes accompanying each panel. Eventually it dawned on me that a “show, don’t tell” approach would be a better way to go.
• 14% are without the glasses guy, whose character design more or less is based on me. Actually, Optipess was first intended to be a personal journal comic of some sort, but I decided against it when I realized that truly interesting events in my life are very few and far between.
• There are actually 102 strips posted on this site. The odd ones out are the very first Optipess comic and the excellent guest strip by reader Mico.
• 15% are in an “alternate style”, where I basically tried to experiment in other styles than the usual cartoony look. I can’t tell if these attempts were successful, but at least they were fun to do.
• Only 6 strips were sketched and inked with traditional media, the rest are completely digital. All strips were colored digitally, except one.
• According to Google Analytics, Optipess.com has been visited 266 253 times since December 1st 2008, ranking up 774 680 page views — which probably are the same numbers Penny Arcade get in one day.
• The top 3 most viewed strips are Jason, Friend of the Butterflies, Support Groups and The Microwaveman.
• Top 3 referrers to Optipess.com have been StumbleUpon, Reddit and IsItFunnyToday.
• Weirdest search terms leading traffic to my site are probably “Ape Escape porn comics”, “one leg pelvic thrust” or “zlorx”.
• Most site visitors are not surprisingly from the United States, with Canada and United Kingdom trailing behind. Norway is in 5th. At the bottom of the list we have less awesome countries such as Vanuatu, Burkina Faso, Libya, Gabon and Kazakhstan.

Ok, that’s it. Thanks for reading these first 100 comics, and hopefully you’ll stick around for a hundred more!