Slashdot Mirror
Web Comic 'Pokey The Penguin' Celebrates Its 19th Anniversary (twitter.com)
It's one of the longest-running comics on the internet. (Slashdot is approaching its 20th anniversary, and in its first year ran two stories about Pokey.) Open source developer Steve Havelka of Portland, Oregon created the truly bizarre strip back in 1998 -- one legend says it was originally a parody of another comic drawn with Microsoft Paint -- and he's since sporadically cranked out 637 strips.
Since 2010 he's also been publishing the cartoons in printed books, and this year launched an equally surreal page on Patreon identifying himself as "Steve Havelka, THE AUTHORS of Pokey the Penguin," offering supporters a "mystery item in the mail". Pokey has lots of fans -- he earned a shout-out in the videogame Hitman: Blood Money -- and very-long-time Slashdot reader 198348726583297634 informs us that on this 19th anniversary Pokey "is celebrating on Twitter!" where he's apparently accosting other web cartoonists and touting a new birthday strip. (Not to be confused with that truly horrible Pokey-goes-to-a-party movie created in Adobe Flash.)
I'd like to hear from any Slashdot readers who remember Pokey the Penguin -- but I'm also curious to hear from Slashdot readers who have never read the strip. ComixTalk called it "one of those webcomics that really only exist because of the Internet -- it would be hard to see something like this in any other medium... there's just something about Pokey the Penguin that fits online."
Since 2010 he's also been publishing the cartoons in printed books, and this year launched an equally surreal page on Patreon identifying himself as "Steve Havelka, THE AUTHORS of Pokey the Penguin," offering supporters a "mystery item in the mail". Pokey has lots of fans -- he earned a shout-out in the videogame Hitman: Blood Money -- and very-long-time Slashdot reader 198348726583297634 informs us that on this 19th anniversary Pokey "is celebrating on Twitter!" where he's apparently accosting other web cartoonists and touting a new birthday strip. (Not to be confused with that truly horrible Pokey-goes-to-a-party movie created in Adobe Flash.)
I'd like to hear from any Slashdot readers who remember Pokey the Penguin -- but I'm also curious to hear from Slashdot readers who have never read the strip. ComixTalk called it "one of those webcomics that really only exist because of the Internet -- it would be hard to see something like this in any other medium... there's just something about Pokey the Penguin that fits online."
User Friendly was my favorite back in the day, before it went into a permanent loop.
http://userfriendly.org/
+1
I'm sad that one of my favorites have come to an end. http://www.sabrina-online.com/ :)
First started in 1996 and only finished end 2017. With four-ish pages a month. (Archive: http://www.sabrina-online.com/... )
And for the geeks, it was and mostly is still done with an Amiga. Fans of the platform will know EWS's style.
http://twokinds.keenspot.com/
Kat ^_^
#DeleteFacebook
Surely you know about Pokey.
#DeleteFacebook
Dude, 1997 wasn't twenty years....
Damn I'm old.
#DeleteFacebook
The thing I remember most about reading Pokey was a curious link on their page to a fictional band with a detailed history. I enjoyed the comic too and even made my own fan comics which I have somewhere. Good times.
Twinstiq, game news
I was reading pokey back then, around '97 I guess, while interning at IBM. Sometimes it would genuinely make me laugh, sometimes it would make me think. I've always loved stuff that fucks with your head, though. Therefore, do not drink and drive!!!
I just read several of the strips over a wide range of years, and I just didn't get a single one of them. Maybe high art is just beyond me or something, but these didn't click with me at all. Not even a grin.
Better known as 318230.
pokey at the jewelry store
There. It's my favorite Pokey strip. It's also the only Pokey strip I like. I don't really get the love for Pokey... I don't get the love for Zippy the Pinhead either.
I really do like this one. The increasing aburdity of the situation unfolds with IMHO perfect comic timing.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
That's also been around for like 20 years now. Still publishing daily.
As far as I remember, the oldest originally-web comic still running is Piled Higher and Deeper with October 27, 1997 launch.
Oh James Sharman, heed to our cries for help.
That's fucked up. I like it!
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
So far, it looks like Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com/) may be the oldest comic strip (posted here at least) that is still running. It started August 19, 1997, and is still updating 3-5 times a week. Given that it used to update 7 times a week, a conservative estimate for the number of strips is ~19.5*52*4 = ~4000 strips! And the quality (at least of the art) is dramatically improved since the start. Another favorite old comic of mine is Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/). It's been around since June of 2000, updated 7 days a week, and it's never missed an update (~6100 strips!). Howard Taylor's art and story work has gotten excellent, and the quality is consistently high. And, of course, PVP and Penny Arcade have both been around since 1998.
Scary, isn't it? Doesn't seem that long ago when I was dialing in.
The Playstation is 22 years old. The iPhone will be 10 in June and in some places you can't even use the original any more because there are no 2G networks left.
My beloved Amiga is 32 years old. 16 bit chipset with a CPU that was 32 bit internally. And I still remember the addresses of the customer registers, because back then for some reason we didn't even bother using #define for them. I guess we were used to low level monitors where you would experimentally poke stuff by address, since they never included friendly register names to save memory.
And even back then, the 8 bit machines were old hat.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So it's layers-deep ironic irony? Isn't that sort of ironic?
Being old can be useful, I guess, when ancient internet history comes up (yay, I'm a slashdot elder?). Sluggy Freelance was late in 96, and I think Help Desk (ubersoft) was earlier that same year. It's been published continuously although there're a few hiatus periods, so it may or may not count as prepaying sluggy.
http://www.jerkcity.com 6,500+ of fully automated humor.
> Pokey is a true work of genius that occupied a lot of my waiting to compile time along with k5[sic, probably kuro5hin] back in the good old days.