Happy 2018, everyone (at least everyone celebrating these things in conjunction with Gregorian calendars.)

I spent most of the holiday break being sick, which is no fun, and breaking a tooth, which was such a non-event I don’t remember when it actually happened, but I’m on the mend now, and am terrifically busy trying to catch up on all the work that I was meant to do last week.

Fresh health and a big stack of things to do? Auspicious beginnings! 2018 will certainly have some suck in it, but it will begin (at least for me) with a proper grind.

We used to celebrate round-number milestones when counting the number of days that Schlock Mercenary has been running, but once we hit 2,000 I realized that the next “important” round number was 5,000, and I lost interest in the project for a while.

We hit 2,000 days on December 3rd of 2005. That was twelve years ago.

As of Friday, December 22nd, 2017, Schlock Mercenary is 6403 days old. To celebrate, we’ll post the 6404th comic, and then we’ll celebrate that one with 6405.

Sandra and I really like having these jobs of ours¹, so we celebrate by continuing to do them. Thank you for making that possible.

¹ My job: write, illustrate²
Sandra’s job: alpha-read, plot-doctor, edit, layout, financials, plus a million other things that convert the writing and illustrating into food and rent.
² Technically I don’t do all the illustrating. Coloring my line art has been Travis’s job for (*napkin napkin guess*) roughly 3000 days.