Anyway, check out the scribbled comics below! Reminder: clicking the image will BLOW IT UP, or maybe just enlarge it.

In any case, here are some other comics I’ve been reading lately. Maybe you’ll like them too?

Buni by Ryan Pagelow should hit the mark perfectly, especially if you like sickly optimistic bunnies with terrible luck. Also, if you prefer your comics with as few words as possible, Ryan has gone for a completely pantomime and dialogue-free strip with wonderful results. Gloriously dark but still able to put a smile on my face every time.

Lair of the Lizardmin is a lovely comic I’ve been enjoying for a while now. Especially I’m absolutely enamored by the visual style and the character designs, quite up to the point that I usually just start snickering from the expressions of the characters. Which are all Lizardmin, by the way. With the occasional Robotmin, Fishmin and Octopoid, not to mention the mysteriously elusive Gorrilamin as their mutual enemy.

Savage Chickens is probably a comic you already know and love. If not, prepare to waste hours on Doug Savages’ hundreds (or is it thousands?) of gag-a-day strips, all rendered lovingly with mostly ridiculous-looking chickens taking the main stage. As a fellow office slave I’m also very pleased to see it’s entirely produced on sticky notes – finally someone put these annoying things to good use.

Werebears and Lonely Children by Jennifer Barrett is definitely not an odd 80′s horror/drama mashup as the name would suggest, but instead a low-key, often adorable, always amusing relationship comic with a simple but effective visual style. It reminds me perhaps of Pictures for Sad Children, another favorite of mine, but it might just be the name similarities talking.

So yeah – go read these while I scamper back to the drawing board (quite literally), this time hopefully with a regained sense of how “jokes”, “comics” and “drawing” work, things that seemed completely foreign to me last time around. See you next time! (Fingers crossed.)

Also, Happy New Year!

• Up until 30th November 2010, there has been posted 212 comics on this site, with 993 panels in total – which means the strip due for Monday will feature my 1000th comic panel. But then again I counted this strip as one panel, and this one as four panels, and I’m not entirely sure I even counted correctly, so I’m only 80% sure this information is correct.
• I have drawn 5 zombie strips, 4 pirate strips and only one ninja strip, which also is a pirate strip. The most frequently used tags are pantomime (used 119 times, 56%), someone dies (used 100 times, 47%) and animals (used 46 times, 21%).
• In total, 159 deaths were depicted or at least imminently implied. In addition to these, 3204 people died in this alien attack, and 34 casualties occurred in this traffic accident. Furthermore, there were additional undisclosed amounts of casualties in one plane crash, three train collisions, two sea monster attacks, three alien attacks, two nuclear bomb detonations, four robot attacks and one space shuttle explosion.
• According to my Google Analytics stats ranging from December 1st 2008 until December 1st 2010, Optipess.com has seen 935 996 visits and 3 297 725 pageviews.
• The day with the most visits is still February 17th, 2009 with 17 175 visits, which probably is the same numbers Axe Cop get in one hour on a slow day.
• The day with least visits is December 2nd, 2008, where the total was one – and that was probably me.
• 10 093 visitors reached this site by searching for “optipess” in their search engine of choice.  442 visitors searched for “optipress comic” – with a superflous “r”. One person found the site by googling “bingos ate your baby”. Yes, “Bingos”.
• “Optipess” has been misspelled as “optipes”, “optopess”, “optipress”, “optimipess”, “optipedd”, “optippesss” and countless other variations. Guys, don’t browse the web when drunk. Then again, that’s what I get for choosing a made-up word as the name for my comic strip, I guess.
• The most popular strip overall has been Dad vs Dad, with 85 447 pageviews. Jason, Friend of the Butterflies, Support Groups and Bad Girl are trailing closely behind.
• Top 3 referrers are StumbleUpon, Reddit and Feedburner.
• Speaking of my RSS Feed, it currently has 3 038 subscribers. It definitely is the easiest way to read the strip, but also the most distanced from the site. Subscribers, feel free to click through to the site, leave comments and oogle at my ads once in a while!
• Speaking of comments, 1 696 of them have been posted to this site – and I immensely appreciate every one of them – well, excluding my own 235 comments. Total word count in the comments is 23 901.
• 403 different nicknames have been used. Most active users after me (with number of comments in parenthesis) have been danineteen (78), bactherman (77), speearr (67) and Yacine (64).
• The strip with the most comments (27) is Love is Blind from January 15th 2010. A lot of them were from a surprisingly high number of readers with color blindness. Sorry, guys!
• Most Facebook “likes” and Tweets: Missing Piece (297 likes and 48 tweets.)
• Most Reddit upvotes: 385 for Freddy vs Jason. However I didn’t get any traffic out of it since the submitter had rehosted the strip to an image host. Very annoying.
• Most StumbleUpon views: still Jason, Friend of the Butterflies with roughly 50 000 views.
• Best strip (in my opinion) that didn’t get much attention through social media: probably the personal favorite Newton Surprise. I’m still very proud of that one.

Okay, I hope this list has been a bit like reading an IMDB trivia page of a movie you somewhat enjoy! Oh, and celebrations here at Optipess.com will continue for roughly one year, just in time for the next site birthday.

Most notably there’s a brand new Facebook page for Optipess. This replaces the old group thing on there, the biggest difference being that this one will actually be updated! At the very least I’m running a magical RSS import script that notifies you of every new strip (when it works as advertised, I should note), but there’s also a chance other news and semi-important messages will appear here. And maybe later some exclusive comics? Who knows!

Also, even less formal and basically bordering on the completely mundane, I’m also on the micro-blogging sensation site “Twitter” which you may have heard of already. Here I will inform you of what I just ate for breakfast or the current color of my socks. Oh, and the existence of new comic strips will also be tweeted about along with other comic-related events. Such as my excitement if I discover a new Photoshop shortcut key, for example. Thrilling!

PS: In addition to these, I’m also present on other more or less “social” music sites such as Last.fm and RateYourMusic, which may or may not be of interest, probably depending on how good your taste in music is.

Ok, now back to drawing tomorrow’s comic!