Goats: Seven Years of Intense Stupidity

Goats is seven years old today. I like to use our anniversary to give a sort of "State of the Comic" address every year. It's a good way for me to put everything that has come before in perspective and to prepare for what lies ahead. But before we do that, I need to talk about something else. I need to talk about our new t-shirt, because we are whores, and the power of cash compels me.

Based on the bumper sticker appearing on the door of Oliver's room in the January 12th, 2004 comic strip our new My Killer Robot Skull-Fucked Your Honor Student Super-Advance T-Shirt is now available for sale, and will continue to be available for two weeks until April 15th, also known as Tax Day here in the United States, which is a day when we all proudly pitch in a few dollars to keep our Emperor clothed in the finest invisible robes. If you have a few dollars left afterwards, please consider sending them our way and purchase our new shirt. People who buy the shirt will also receive two Killer Robot bumper stickers free of charge. The stickers can also be ordered separately in five-packs if you're not of the t-shirt-wearing persuasion. We also have offerings for pretty ladies who want a babydoll shirt, and we're offering the shirt in combination with our Surly and Bob shirts in our discounted Anger Three-Pack.

This is probably our most potentially offensive shirt ever. I say potentially because no one has convinced me of exactly why this sentiment should be considered offensive. It has "dirty" language, but no one has ever shown me that words harm the mind. If anything, words free the mind. Words are the tools we use to communicate and educate. People who want to tell you that a word is dirty are trying to control the way you think and express your thoughts. Tell them to go fuck themselves.

The more popular explanation for it's offensiveness is that it portrays violence towards children. This is worthy of consideration, and if anyone can show me that this t-shirt contributes in any way to the increase of robotic violence directed towards schoolchildren, I will stop its sale immediately and put an end to my robotic development program. But until then, I think it's a healthy walk in the park for our good ol' First Amendment, which has been cooped up inside quite a bit lately, snacking on chips on the couch and watching The Jeffersons reruns.

In addition to the highly offensive red banner at the top of the page, you may have also noticed that we've gussied up the place a bit in celebration of the commencement of our eighth year. We've removed our banner ads, mostly because they annoy the hell out of me (and I'm sure that I'm not alone in this sentiment). Other comic sites that are more niche-oriented do well with ads, but I like that we generate our revenue from giving you things that you like (such as books and t-shirts and extra premium content) instead of pestering you to spend your money elsewhere, or to click meaninglessly on a 468x60 rectangle so we can boost our ad stats. It's time to get out of that particular rat maze.

I've taken the opportunity to redo our menus, removing excess images and code in exchange for slightly cleaner CSS and somewhat more semantically correct HTML. The site should load a bit faster, and I've tested the site in IE, Mozilla, and Opera on the PC and Safari and IE on the Mac, and things seem to be working okay for the most part. If you're having problems seeing things properly, you've probably got our old stylesheet cached. Please make sure you clear your cache and restart your browser before letting me know that everything is all messed up for you.

We've also made our menus a lovely shade of orange, as well as changing all of our link colors and highlight colors to an orange palette as well. I know you hate it, I know it's burning your retinas, but please wait a bit before burning me in effigy. Many of you didn't like the new logo at first, but I've gotten emails from a number of folks who now have come around to a different point of view. So there.

I've been drawing Goats now for seven years. There are 1,469 strips in our archive (not counting the Premium Sunday Strips). We're pulling in about 100,000 unique hosts per month (that's hosts, not readers -- anyone who tells you they know how many readers they have is lying to you). We're serving about 1.5 million page views each month. Those are pretty good numbers. They're not fabulous -- I've seen dozens of strips surpass us in popularity over the years. But they're good enough for me. It makes me happy to know that we're bringing joy to that many people on a thrice-weekly basis. It makes me ecstatic that they're willing to part with some cash on occasion to keep us afloat. I think this is the first year that I realized that we might actually be able to pull off what we've been trying to do since day one -- turn Goats into a full-time job.

We're certainly not there yet. It probably wouldn't be difficult if I were a desperately lonely single cartoonist who had given up on the outside world, subsisting on cans of Spaghetti-Os and broadcast television in a shack in Montana fending off bands of angry motorcyclists with rocks and pointy sticks. But NYC is an expensive place to live, and we both have wives who want things like houses and yachts. So it's going to take a bit more time. But I think that time is coming soon. Maybe a couple more years. We're leveling up, and we've gotten strong like bull. If you want, you can certainly help us get there quicker. We need to grow our audience by about five to ten times, and the best way to do that is if you tell people about us. Force them to read the archives. Lend them your Goats books (or better yet, buy them their own) and get them hooked. Link to us from your weblog. Tell people about Goats in the forums you hang out at (unless it's our forum, 'cause the people there already know about it). We can do this, but only with your help.

And what do you get in exchange for this? My promise that I'm going to continue to put my heart, soul, sweat, blood and tears (along with any other bodily fluids I can spare) into this comic strip to make it as funny, entertaining, provocative, controversial and compelling as possible. We're going to keep rolling out new site features, new merchandise, new things we haven't even thought of yet. And I swear on the blood of my childhood hamsters, dear departed Scooter and Harvey, that I will bring the strip back to at least five days a week once I'm able to commit myself to it full-time. That's my goal. Please help us achieve it.

If any of you in the NYC area are free tonight (tonight being Thursday, April 1), come on down to the Peculier Pub (at the corner of Bleecker and Laguardia, just a bit south of Washington Square Park in Manhattan). We'll be there celebrating our first seven years (and we'll have some free goodies for you). Come celebrate with us.