I’m celebrating seven years of Schlock the way I did last year — I’ll be down at Dragon’s Keep working on the comic. In this case I’ll be pencilling and inking the bonus story for the next book.

Odds are good that no well-wishers will stop in (at least none who wouldn’t have come by anyway), but that’s okay. I’m all about getting work done.

Wow.

Today, June 12th of 2007, marks the seventh anniversary of the first appearance of Schlock Mercenary on the web.

The first three or four weeks of the strip went up in June of 2000 in a long-extinct subdirectory of the tayler.com domain. Then I discovered Keenspace (now ComicGenesis), and their automation made my life much easier.

For the first three months the strip never had more than about 150 readers. When I joined Keenspot in September of 2000 that number immediately grew by more than an order of magnitude. It continued to grow, and four short years later, in September of 2004, I left my day job with Novell. Not long after that I flirted briefly with anti-collectivistic independence, and then wisely joined eight fellow pros here at Blank Label Comics. Server logs lately indicate that somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people enjoy the strip each day.

And it really has been “each day.” Schlock Mercenary has run daily, without fail, for seven years now. There have been some “late” updates, but for me “late” means the server needed to be reminded that there was a comic to be displayed. And as of this writing the next forty-seven days of the strip have been inked.

Lots of aspiring webtoonists ask me for advice. I have none to offer. I spent four years neglecting my family and working seventy- to ninety-hour weeks between my day job and the comic strip. My strategy was “deliver the goods every day, without fail, forever.” I’m pretty sure that qualifies as “doing it the hard way.” Nobody who asks for advice is looking for the hard way.

I celebrated the day before the anniversary writing a bonus story for the next book. This bonus story will have as its last strip a re-imagining (with the same dialog) of the very first strip on the web, where Schlock enlists with the Toughs. This particular bit of writing drove home just how far I’ve come in the last seven years. I’ve grown almost immeasurably as an artist, significantly as a writer, and quite tangibly as a businessman.

Through it all, however, I have been humbled you, fair reader. You have graciously allowed me to capture small slices of your imaginations, and thousands of you have contributed in recent months and years to allow me to pursue this work full-time. Sandra and I (and our four kids, two of whom are younger than Schlock) stand gratefully in your debt. We remain committed to delivering this strip every day, for free, forever (or until I die.)

Every so often someone will email me and say “I feel guilty for spending a mere 20 seconds reading an update that must have taken you hours to create.” My response: Please don’t feel guilty. First, it didn’t take hours. Art for art’s sake can take its time, but art for money has to go fast. Second, you should know that there is a psychic energy generated by tens of thousands of people laughing at the same time, and I’m working on getting it to power my giant robot.

A few months ago our role-playing party was ambushed by a druid who turned most of our non-magical metal items into wood. Among the losses — Tim’s character “Irshad” lost his heirloom pair of matched masterwork scimitars. This became the impetus for us taking a contract to “learn more” about the druid (and eventually Irshad put a few rounds in his ten-ring.)

There’s the back-story.

Today Tim brought cheese. We ate it. He had to leave early, and the only utensil he’d brought for tearing into the gouda and brie was a nice Oneida flatware fork. As he was leaving he said “I’ll be back later — please don’t lose the fork. I need it.”

I said “because it’s a decent fork, or because it’s special?”

“My grandfather bought a matching set for me just before he died.”

“Ah,” I said. “Heirloom fork. We’ll take care of it.”

Indeed. The door had barely shut behind him before I was turning to our GM… “Drew,” I said… “We need to find a wooden fork.”

It turns out that flatware-sized wooden forks are hard to find on short notice. At the grocery store we picked up a box of nice plastic forks. Back at the Keep I gave it a coat of primer, and Drew began picking out colors.

Base-coating (a warm brown) took about three minutes. Another three minutes under a desk lamp and it was dry. Then Drew and I began painting wood-grain on it in “bleached bone” (a warm off-white). The phone rang. Tim was ready to be picked up back at his place (it was raining). Drew said “I’m in the middle of something… I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

So… the two of us frantically painted wood-grain. Then we washed the whole fork with Chestnut Ink, which is a reddish-brown translucent color that provided common tone for the base-coat and the grain. Total painting time was maybe 15 minutes, start to finish.

Drew went to collect Tim. I gave the fork a coat of matte varnish (Krylon spray). And I have to say, it looked a LOT like a wooden fork.

When Tim arrived he plunked his stuff down and looked at the fork. “What’s THIS?” he asked, picking it up.

“Well,” I said… “We meant to take good care of your fork, but there was this druid…”

I hope Tim keeps the fork. Ten years from now it may be as much of an heirloom as that Oneida set. I mean, how often do your friends speed-paint something for you as part of a practical joke?