Did  I say tomorrow? I clearly meant ‘Saturday’. Anyway, here you are: the most popular FtB strips since the beginning from number 5 to number 1…

5. Back Again

Tibetan spiritualism, Molluscs and genocidal tyrants = winning combination! I have actually scripted a few more strips with slug Hitler as a recurring character, but can’t decide if it’s in bad taste or not (edging towards not…)

4. Thick as Cluck

We are all so much chicken soup.

3.Yellow for my Torment

Another of the strips to undergo re-writes right up to publishing, and if I’m honest, I’m still not entirely happy with it. However, this has been probably the most consistently viewed/linked/shared etc. strip I’ve done, so what do I know?!   This is also the oldest strip in the top 10, and it’s interesting to see how the design of Mr. Elf in particular has changed over time.  My own favourite thing about this one is the monkey in the last panel, I worry that I identify with him more often than not…

2.The Printer of the Dark

I love HP Lovecraft, so I was wary of doing him an injustice with this effort, but I think this does pull off the trick of being both funny and ‘Lovecraftian’.  I remember reading ‘The Shadow out of Time’ as a teenager, and experiencing something like vertigo at the scale of his imagination.  Amazing.

1. Life’s a picnic…

Here we are then, the runaway winner! This comic has accumulated over three times the views of it’s nearest rival.  I am genuinely surprised that this one has ended up here, because it was one of those strips I was ambivalent about as I was posting it.  Strip ideas with Faraday getting carried away and dragged underground by ants have existed in my notebook in one shape or form for a long time, but I never was able to work out a satisfactory reason for why that might happen.  In then end I just started drawing it and it just kind of wrote itself, and reaction has been excellent…  maybe I should try that approach more often!

That’s it! Thanks for reading.  You can go home now. Go on. Off you go.

Well, here we are two years and 100 strips on.   In honour of this momentous occasion, and as an assist to new readers or those of you who haven’t been arsed to go through the whole archive yet, I give you, in grand webcomics tradition, the 10 most popular strips on FtB.com since launch way back in July 2008.  In reverse order for a bit of drama, nather’lly.

This is a simple excercise in number crunching – the following 10 comic strips don’t necessarily represent reader favourites, or even my own, they are simply the top ten in terms of visitor numbers.  The site’s readership has grown most since the start of 2010, so naturally there’s a bit of a bias towards more recent strips, but there are one or two in here that surprised me.  As with anything, once you’ve created it and set it free there’s no way of telling how it will be received -some of the most popular comics are ones I honestly felt unsure about, while some of my own personal favourites don’t make the list.  Thusly, without further ado here’s the Faraday the Blob top 10, from 10 to 6…  Point your face at it.

10. Up, up and aweigh

Straight away we have one of the strips that I was unsure of myself.  This one went through a lot of dialogue changes (particularly the clowns!) before I finalised it, but reaction to it has been great.

9. Bongo bongo bongo

Ah Fallout 3, consumer of time, destroyer of buffers… An early enough strip, and one of the first to take on a life of it’s own so to speak.  A salutary lesson in the power of pop-culture to drive traffic on the interwebz (a lesson I haven’t learned!).

8. Destination moon

A reflection on the legacy and motivation of the space race on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing.  I think this is the only FtB strip without a gag or a punchline (No laughing down the back).

7. Emergency Exit

An unexpected surge in hits from a variety of sources in the last few weeks propels this effort into the top ten.  One of the few dotted through the archives that are based on personal experience.  I think I was having a bad day, but really, how the hell can you talk at full volume for 4 hours non-stop about nothing? Had Faraday’s option been open to me, I might have gone for it…  On the plus side, I did get to see the Northern lights over Greenland on the same flight, so I guess things even out!

6. Pigs might Flu

Sometimes it’s hard to resist being topical… A high proportion of Google hits to this site are for ‘Elephant Transformation’, which helps to explain the presence of this comic at #6… I can’t imagine this is remotely like whatever those people are searching for, but I hope they’re not too disappointed…  On a sidenote, I was reminded of this album cover… guess they didn’t get their inoculations either.

That’s it for now… top 5 tomorrow!

Guys don’t worry – a comic is on the way! For some reason I decided that this week of all weeks would be a good one to do a double-sized strip, and then proceeded to get waylaid by all the stuff I already  knew I had to do… It’s nearly done – I am hoping to get it posted tonight, but if it’s tomorrow, don’t kill me plz.

*edit* OK YOU CAN STOP WORRYING NOW ITS UP

Get yerselves over post haste to that fine online repository of comicry, The Cutting Room, where today I feature as a guest artist.  TCR is a sharp blend of observational humour and pop-culture parody, always funny and always entertaining, so when they approached me about featuring as a guest artist my response was a boisterous ‘hell yes!’

I got a kick out of working on this and it was a nice change from drawing blobs, elves and anthropomorphic hares . Anyway, enough guff from me… click on over, check out my guest strip, poke around the archives and enjoy!