Olaf's comics blog

Okay, last night I submitted the 100th and final idea of the “100 ideas in 100 days”. Today is Day 100, which means that I’ve completed the project successfully.

Obviously, not all of the ideas are very good. I knew that would be the case when I started this. Still, I think this qualifies as a success. It has been a really fun challenge for me, and for those of you who’ve read the ideas as I wrote them, I hope you enjoyed at least a couple of them.

If you just tuned in: The purpose of this project was to come up with one hundred ideas for comics in one hundred days. Some of them are plot ideas, some of them are suggestions on how to spice up your existing comic, some of them are ideas on working together, some of them are ideas for wacky experiments and some of them tackle the medium of comics and suggests ways we can do it differently. But they’re all ideas.

You can read a list of all 100 ideas here.

Some statistics

I didn’t always manage to write one update each day. Real life came in the way, and often I found my self far behind the schedule. At the most – May 25-26 – I was sixteen ideas behind schedule. The last day I was actually on schedule (before my five-idea-extravaganza yesterday) was April 16, at idea #31.

Of course, this means I had to write more ideas other days. Broken down, I had one day where I wrote five ideas (June 23), one day where I wrote four ideas (June 18), four days where I wrote three ideas, 23 days where I wrote two ideas, 35 days when I wrote one idea – and 36 days without a single update. Yeah, sorry about those. But I kind of expected something like that to happen. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stick to schedule and actually write an idea every single day. But I managed to keep an average of one idea per day, and I think that’s pretty wicked awesome.

Thank you

Honestly, I don’t know if I’d actually finished this project if it wasn’t for all the great comments I got along the way. So thanks to all of you. I can’t mention you all… Hey, what am I saying? Of course I can.

Thank you, Alexander. Thank you, BoardgameBeast. Thank you, Bookn. Thank you, chops. Thank you, David Morgan-Mar. Thank you, Eirik. Thank you, Gar. Thank you, Izzy Kinrys. Thank you, Jon Magne Kleiven. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, karina. Thank you, Loki. Thank you, Mamma. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, Mechanical. Thank you, MultiversalInk. Thank you, Niha. Thank you, obdormio. Thank you, Ola Bismo. Thank you, somebody. Thank you, PTR. Thank you, tanketom. Thank you, Thom Achenar. Thank you, Timothy Mueller-Harder. Thank you, tonny. And thank you, xxobot. I couldn’t have done it without you all.

And thanks to Gary Tyrrell, Delos Woodruff and David Morgan-Mar for blogging about the project so that more people found it.

I should probably also thank those of you who retweeted my ideas on Twitter or liked them on Facebook… but I have no complete lists of who you are, sorry. Thanks anyway, though.

What’s next?

No, my next project is not 365 ideas in 365 days

I’ve realized in the last hundred days that blogging can be fun, so I’ll probably keep up trying to post regular updates here. By “regular” I don’t mean once a day or anything like that – but I’ll try to write something clever once a week.

I have some ideas for a big project where the hundred ideas I’ve come up with here could come in handy and be integrated. I still don’t want to reveal what that project is, but if all of my plans work out, you should be able to read about it here this autumn. It’s not my top priority, though, I have other comics-related projects I want to work on first.

There’s also a chance that I actually try realizing a couple of these ideas myself, of course. There’s a couple that I really like in this mix. We’ll see.

Anyway, I will probably try organizing the ideas a bit better in the next couple of days. Give them tags or subcategories or something so that it’s easier to find exactly the ideas you’re looking for. Stay tuned.

But for now, thanks for reading – this has been fun!

Dear reader.

Did you find this blog through Google?

Are you one of the many people who found this blog by googling for “olaf sex comics” or “olaf comics often dirty” or “olaf porn comic”?

A wild guess tells me that you’ve come to the wrong place, and that you’re really looking for Oglaf (you’ve already guessed that that link is NSFW, right?).

I wouldn’t be the least surprised if that’s what those of you googling “olaf comic”, “olaf comics” or “olaf webcomic” are looking for either. Especially not since many of you also found my blog by googling for “olag comic”, for some reason. Now, that makes me very suspicious that many of you are googling “olaf” because you don’t know how to spell “oglaf”.

Google Analytics search statistics is a very fascinating tool, but mostly it just tells you how dirty the minds of your readers are. One of the most read posts on this blog, several months after it was written, is still this one. Even more popular is this tag page (which looks identical to the previous link, but check the URL to see how it’s not).

You’d be surprised if I told you how many people found this blog by googling the phrase “menage a 3 nude”. Honestly, I would have assumed that was a search phrase with a lot more competition, and I would also assume that if my blog showed up in your search results it would be glaringly obvious that this clearly wasn’t what you were looking for, even before you clicked the link.

Of course, since humanity and especially the part of humanity that spends most of its time online is obsessed with sexuality, I’m not at all surprised that people google for stuff like “menage a 3 nude”, “questionable content nude”, “black nude hot menage a trois porn” or “comics with nudity”. What surprises me is that these people end up on my blog, when it should be glaringly obvious in the search results that this is a pretty plain text blog.

Because of what feels like a billion deadlines I haven’t been able to blog for a while. Which means I’m a few weeks behind schedule: No worries, though: I still plan to write a hundred ideas in a hundred days.

Earlier when I’ve had huge delays I’ve published three or four ideas in a row. I’m trying something different now: I’m scheduling ideas twelve hours apart. So the next idea will be out at midnight (CEST), the next one after that will be out at noon tomorrow (still CEST), and the next one after that will be out midnight the night after that (yep, still CEST). You can see a list of upcoming ideas in the sidebar to the left.

If I keep publishing two ideas a day for a while, I should be able to catch up with the schedule in a few weeks time. So keep reading!

Oh, and since I’m already in metapost-land: It would mean a lot to me if I got some more input from you. I know from my stats that I have a couple of readers here, but many of the ideas haven’t got a single comment yet. It is fun to come up with these ideas, but it would be more fun if I got some more feedback from others about what you think about them. So if you have an opinion on one of my ideas: Please share it!

Do you wish to use one of my ideas? Feel free to! Please! I haven’t quite figured out how to actually put the license here, but my intention with these ideas is that everybody who wants to can take them and use them for whatever they want. Yes, that includes for-profit stuff. All I’m asking is that you credit me for the idea, and I would also appreciate it if you told me about it when using one of my ideas. But apart from that, I have no restrictions: If you want an idea, take it. I will try to realize some of them myself, but there’s no way I’ll have the time to do that with all of them.

Let’s end this post with an open question: I’ve been playing with the idea of putting all these ideas in a book. Is that a book any of you would be interested in reading? Of course, the book would have to be better than the blog: I would have to draw examples for most of the ideas, come up with better examples, go more into detail on some of the ideas, and so on. But if I did, would you be interested?

Because I’m too lazy to write a blog post about it every time I find some content online that I love and want to share, here’s a list of some of the interesting things I’ve found online this past week:

• 2010 Eisner Award nominations announced. I’ll try getting around to reading all the nominated digital comics this time.
• Webcomic is considered added to the dictionary by Merriam-Webster. Awesome! (Thanks to Larry for the tip.)
• “The payoff will be in good karma” is a must-read for everybody working as a freelancer. Yes, webcomic artist, that is you. Thanks to Kneon and Gary for the tip.
• Pixels is a really amazing video. I wish I was the one who came up with this idea. Thanks to @krisstraub and @malki for tweeting about it.
• Crazy Tetris made me laugh out loud. Thanks to Carl for linking to it.
• Max Powers is back in PvP, and if you’ve read the comic for as long as I have, you will be awed by this strip. Seriously.

And now, I want you to write a comment where you answer one simple question for me: Would you prefer it if I spread these out and shared a link every time I found one, or is a weekly recap the better way to do it? (The reason I haven’t already written about stuff like the Eisner awards is that this is not primarily a news site, and I assume that if you’re interested in it you’re probably already reading Fleen or something anyway?)

What’s the most famous Norwegian comic of all time?

Well, we have multiple-Eisner-winner Jason, all of his comics are pretty popular, right? Lise Myhre’s Nemi is pretty big, too, with regular publication in Metro and several books in the US. The local comic book character most famous here is Frode Øverli’s Pondus, but he doesn’t have many publications outside Scandinavia.

Still, I bet that the most famous Norwegian comic of all time is neither of these. The most famous Norwegian comic of all time has never been published — it appears in a music video. This music video.

But despite its fame, I would say it is a very bad comic, as, until last year, I’ve never been able to make out what on earth the comic is about. Okay, some guys drive motorcycles? And then one of them wins? And the others get mad at him? What kind of plot is that? Am I missing something?

Fortunately, there are those with a much better imagination than mine. So, instead of a decent blog post today, here’s an amazing interpretation of a-ha’s «Take on Me», which made me roll on the floor laughing the first time I watched it and which I still quote heavily. Turn up your sound and watch this.

Have a nice day!