Bobbins is my original webcomic, that ran from 1998 to 2002, and then again from 2013 to 2015. The first spell is when I learned how to make comics by drawing about a thousand quite primitive ones. The second run began when I had to make some “fake” Bobbins comics, set just before the original run (to fill in a bit of tricky continuity in another story), and got back into making small strips. After those fake strips set in the late 90s, I made Bobbins comics that featured the characters right now. I had to stop when the story, weighed down by the intervening years of heavy continuity, got “out of hand”.
This comic, referred to at the time as "Bobbins dot horse" (due to the domain name I bought to replace my long-lost bobbins.org URL) continues the story in the late 90s, from those thirteen initial “fake” strips. It respects the form and content of my earliest comics, while walking between the raindrops to tell the story a different way. I’m not interested in re-doing the original stories, but on re-reading them, I’m interested in all the things I thought at the time and didn’t say.
The original Bobbins was my attempt to become a syndicated cartoonist. This new run represents what it might have looked like if I’d had the slightest idea what I was doing in the autumn of 1998. It’s also a chance to explore characters who I treated quite irresponsibly, and introduce some new ones.
Whenever I was running out of gas in the 2010s, but wanted to keep putting up comics, I'd make another batch of these. I managed 250 in the end, which feels like a lot for something that started as a dotty experiment slash joke. They were written day-by-day in the same improvisational style that I'd begun my comic-making career in. I tried one last batch in 2022, but never put them on the website (they dribbled out on my Patreon some time later). In retrospect they were pretty good, so I've added them here now.
Do I need to have read all the old Bobbins comics? No, in fact, it’s better if you don’t. They’re really only of historical interest. The original art is lost to the ages and they’re tiny .gif files.
Why “bobbins.horse”? A project as misguided as this needs a truly misguided domain name. I think I’ve achieved that.
Will you make any more of these? Maybe one day. At this point... probably not.