Tomorrow is April 1, traditionally April Fool's Day, but also the anniversary of Goats. The ninth anniversary, one year short of a decade. The strip counter shows 1,866 strips in the main archive. When I started drawing the strip, I was 23. I'm now 32.
Holy shit.
It's really a bit too much to process, how much has changed in that time, how much I've learned, how incredible it's been to have the privilege of entertaining you good folks for all these years. I want to thank you all for the unbelievable support you've given us, for your understanding when we've fallen short, and for your kind words and kinder purchases of Goats merch.
Anyway, Year 10 starts on Monday. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again for making nine years possible!
| 5% (126) | Since 1997 | |
| 7% (192) | Since 1998 | |
| 10% (262) | Since 1999 | |
| 9% (245) | Since 2000 | |
| 8% (209) | Since 2001 | |
| 8% (211) | Since 2002 | |
| 10% (268) | Since 2003 | |
| 13% (345) | Since 2004 | |
| 13% (345) | Since 2005 | |
| 6% (172) | Just started reading this year | |
| 4% (105) | Hell, I'd never read that crap, ugh |
Yes. I was 18, just gotten to college, i was looking for pictures of goats to send to someone and i typed in "www.goats.com" and found this place :)
Soon I'll be 27 - liek woah. Thanks for 9 great years of fantastic comics! :D
-Sheryls
I was trying to prove to a friend of mine that porn was at a lot of innocent URLs. I typed Goats.com in, and Lo and Behold! there was this quirky little webcomic.
I've been reading it ever since.
Congratulations, guys. And thanks for the autographs and time at I-Con this past weekend. You made a friend of mine very jealous. Very much looking forward to year ten!
(Odd; I registered in '05 after 2 years of internet cowardice, yet I'm showing up as registered in March of this year. Oh well...)
Double digits on Monday. That makes me feel old (1997) too.
Why the heck didn't someone start a scotch way back then?
Holy cow, has it been that long? I think I started reading back right before the Crab City [goats.com] series. I think it was after I got a link to the Blerg. Eat kitty. [goats.com] strip in an e-mail.
February 14, 2003. Not just Valentine's Day (and the first I spent with my still-boyfriend and resident Jew), but also the day I met Jon and Phillip, back at the very first Ubercon.
Several blizzards (and a few eye-catching flyers) later, Goats enjoys the status of the only webcomic I have read religiously for such a length of time. It's lasted through three computer crashes, four jobs, and two major changes of hobby.
Still have the same boyfriend, though.
i found it in '97 during highschool when we attempted to find sites by typing in random words. However, i didn't really read it earnestly until 99/00 when i was at college and had friends who were... 'off'.
sheryls! That's my story! Mine. Give it back. Or I will eat you.
I too was just starting college at the age of 18, and type goats.com into the browser. I laughed at the comic I saw. I proceeded to read through the archives. Granted, that was in 1999, a few strips before the Fear and Toothgnip series, and thus I'm only going to be turning 25.
I stumbled upon Goats at the tender age of 13 and have been reading it ever since. That was 5 years ago. I guess it's not that long, but it feels that way. Anyway, thanks for the great comic.
needless to say i was confused. fortunately at some point i came back and explored old strips and got hooked.
I think that I started reading Goats around late Pork and Adultery/early Tangled Web. The Republicans for Voldemort strip was in there, and while I don't think that it was the first Goats that I read, it may have helped to cement my allegiance.
At the same time, I think that I read the Nippleby saga, which was much earlier, before I really plowed through the archives. A friend may have sent me a link to it, perhaps before I really started reading the strip.
So here I am, bothering a coworker to see if he has anymore webcomics as recommended reading (I tend to be to lazy to follow links pages). He refers me, about 5 times, to goats. So I finally follow the link, right at the end of infinite typewriters. Needless to say, I was quite confused at what I saw as I had no idea of the characters involved or the back story. So I started reading the archives, and it saved my life. I swear, I don't think I'd survive tech support if it wasn't for sites like this. Goats saved my life.
No kidding, I think it took me a solid afternoon of final-paper-writing avoidance to get through it, and that was back during my undergrad...
goats was so freakin sweet when i started reading, last year, some fantastic work jon
i found goats late in 1999, either from sheryls or another friend of ours. actually. it may have been been sheryls and him talking about goats and i checked it out... something like that anyway.
thanks jon, it's been an awesome 6 years!
I put "since 2002," but I honestly don't remember exactly when I started reading the strip. I do know it was after picking up a flyer at SPX one year, and the strip was three times a week and black-and-white then. Cartoon-Jon was having some major romantic upheaval and there was a daily where he was striding purposefully past a photo background on his way to lay down the law...
You mean this one [goats.com]? If you, You probably wanted 2003.
For me, it was in 2000, when the Reunion strips were going up, and a friend from Cornell e-mailed me and told me to look at the strips and see if I could figure out where they were set (Hot Truck, Chapter House, etc.). I e-mailed Jon to let him know I was enjoying the strips, and it turned out that we had several mutual friends from Cornell and of course shared a love of beer and stupidity.
Not long after, I won a free copy of Vol. IV at the Goats pub gathering because I was the only one geeky enough to guess that the serial number on the laminated "License to Drink" cards was Goats.com's IP address. (Which is pretty sad, given just how geeky some of Jon's stalkers are.)
In the interim, I've been ball-gagged and tied to a tree by a Pope and a couple of aliens. I'm still there. Won't someone please come untie me - or at least feed me some ice cream?
I started reading Goats in January of last year, somewhere in the middle of the Return of the Chaos Pope [goats.com] storyline. My archive crawl went fairly quickly, particularly because I skipped all of the damn [goats.com] Shazam [goats.com] Twix [goats.com] sagas [goats.com].
Goats was my first webcomic. And you always remember your first. Thanks, Jon.
