The events leading to the creation of Bob and George began in March 2000. After returning from Spring Break, my girlfriend of more than two years told me she was leaving me for some guy she was screwing on the side. Suddenly finding myself with more time on my hands than I knew what to do with, and having just bought myself a brand new computer to make myself feel better, I decided I needed a really big project to fill my time. About the same time, I had just come across webcomics. For the first time, I could read comic strips, in their entirety, for free! Years of entertainment were at my fingertips, and I read comics like Sluggy Freelance and Dragon-Tails. Before long, I wanted to make a webcomic too. But first I needed an idea. The original Bob and George was first created in 6th grade. I was making a cartoon for an English project, and I drew a silly looking man with stick-arms, stick-legs, and a big rubbery head. I may still have this somewhere. Over the years, his head became less rubbery, his arms and legs got some thickness, and he earned the name "George". The name sort of came from Of Mice and Men, though I named him after the wrong character. Eventually George was teamed up with a short smart kid named Bob, the straight man to George's moron. They shared adventures in a few comics, along with a tempermental super-hero named Napalm. I realized early on that I couldn't draw, so I eventually gave up on the comic idea... for a while. My next attempt at a comic was about a group of kids that were accidentally exposed to an experiment that turned them into superheroes. The super-hero team was made up of characters such as Blitz, Napalm, Aqua, Sub-Zero, Thunder, and a few others. George, in this incarnation, was an idiot with the power of sonics. That is, he yelled really loud. Alas, that comic never made it past its introduction. That was pretty much where George and I stood at the beginning of 2000, when I remembered George and his friends and decided they would make a good comic strip. I could take my cast of characters and put them in college! Yeah! Wait, wasn't that the plot of College Roomies From Hell? Well, I figured I could come up with enough of my own original ideas to make it unique and stand out. And while I wasn't really thinking my comic would become all that popular, I secretly hoped it would. The basic plot was that George would go off to college and meet up with a cast of characters that would make his college years very interesting. From Nate the underachieving super-genius to Duncan the depressed chemist to Jay the annoying dickhead computer programmer, the cast was set. And, I decided, this would all be ready by April 1st! Yeah, it wasn't. As my self-imposed deadline approached, I found myself without a scanner or even a satisfying way to draw my characters. In a pinch, I ended up using Megaman sprites to for some filler comics until my "real" comics were ready. Days passed and still no scanner... and I found myself starting to really like the Megaman sprites. I started developing a small storyline around them, something about what happened before the first Megaman game, a time period I had been speculating about. Weeks past, and I finally gave up and bought my own scanner. I planned on releasing the real comic on June 1st... and I hated it. The delusion that I could draw disappeared quickly, and I decided to return to the sprite comic until I could figure out this whole "drawing" thing. The stories I was doing with the Megaman sprites continued and I found myself enjoying the sprite comic more and more, even though no one was really reading it. The Yellow Demon came and went, and the readers slowly trickled in. By the middle of July, I had decided to try drawing the comic again. July 16th was going to be the return to the hand-drawn stuff, once again, it didn't work out. I still wasn't happy with the way things were looking, and continued using the sprites with none the wiser. By the end of the summer of 2000, I probably had less than 100 readers, but I continued on because I just liked making the comic. I was glad if even a handful of people were reading my comic and I plugged on, telling this story I wanted to tell. Upon returning to school in the fall, I decided I was finally going to get off my ass and do this whole drawing thing. I worked on it exclusively for the latter half of September 2000, taking time off from the comic. I returned in October with Version 2.0, ready to roll. Ten days later, I realized that I still can't draw. This time, though, knowing I simply wasn't going to get any better, I dropped the whole pretense of making Bob and George a hand-drawn comic and concentrated solely on the sprites. Which meant that now I had a comic named after characters that weren't in it. I stumbled upon the idea for a set of impersonators to show up in the comic, and then I decided I might as well just have them end up being Bob and George, allowing the title characters to actually be in their own comic, and the comic has gone from there. Since its beginning, the comic grew immensely. The readership had grown from just a handful to over 25,000 readers every day at its peak, with about 8,000-10,000 daily readers still. Starting as just a single comic, the BnG website now includes a chatroom, a message board (with thousands of members), and a number of additional hosted comics. Someone once asked me if I would still have started Bob and George if I had known what it would turn into. I told him I most certainly would. This has been an experience I wouldn't trade for anything. Well, maybe lots of money. Money would be nice.

The First Comic Hand-Drawn Bob and George Proto Man Awakens Dr. Light Dies The Attack of the Yellow Demon Hand-Drawn Again George's Appearance Bob's Appearance