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In the beginning there was Suck and Yahoo and later Slate and The Onion, |
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but before them all, sort of, was kNetz Comics, a home page of the comic strips and html dabblings of yours truly, Jack Knetzger. Running from 1995--1998, kNetz was only one of 150 amateur toon shops when it launched, and attracted a half-million hits in its first two years, mostly maintenance by the author, before dying the slow death of longer times between new material updates and dwindling traffic, diverted to hundreds of other web cartoon sites. Profiled on the front page of the Dallas Morning News (well the "Living" section anyway), first with client-side interactive cartoon (an OJ Simpson trial piece), and pioneer of early Quicktime cartoons sequenced in Director and Painter before Flash took over, kNetz soldiered on into web obscurity, its chin up, head held high, eyes forward, walking smack dab into the Texas telecom bust of 2000 that reduced our web hobby budget to "zero, zero, zero." And yet, all things are new again. The empty buildings in the Richardson, Texas Telecom corridor are humming with new furniture start-ups, Monster.com is abrim with technical writer |
job listings, and the Knetz Comics budget is back, aided by much cheaper costs ($4 a month for 5 GB of hosted webspace vs $100/month for 5mb in '96) and much better site management tools (Abode GoLive, Dreamweaver). Gone are the days of 12kb uploads of this week's 150kb comic strip gif, crashing constantly, and oops, I forgot the one .htm file. Now it's all "upload modified files," step on the DSL or cable modem ftp, and presto chango, everything's in sync.
So does this mean there'll be a new comic strip promptly every week? New cartoons constantly? What, are you kidding? It ain't 1996 anymore -- that Dow won't do that again for the rest of our lives, and we work hard, really hard at the day job -- but there are some nice things about 2005. We can promise some blog journal entries, photos, mp3's of Jack's latest jams, and yes, the occasional new artwork. So Enjoy and God Bless. -- the Editor January 2005 |
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