Good Lord 'n Butter! You folks have been reading the site at a HUGE rate, and giving the servers a thorough drubbing. Thank you for that! On day one, you read 400,000 pages of the site, crashed the BLC adservers twice, and kept clicking for more...450,000 more the next day! Please be careful: support like that makes a cartoonist feel like he made the right choice in bringing his strip indy. :)
---
All the site hiccups have pretty much been fixed, so let’s turn to the fun stuff: the cool new features that sheldoncomics.com has to offer!
1.) Random Strip: Have you tried the “random” button, directly below the comic? Lord how I love this thing. If you’re killing time between classes or before that 12:30 meeting, this is the perfect way to get in a little burst of entertainment. It’s strangely addicting, too.
2.) Send to a Friend: Found the perfect strip for your cousin/friend/cat trainer, and wish you could share it with them? Send it, along with a personalized note, just by filling out the send-to-a-friend “napkin” below the strip. (It’s also a great way to introduce folks to the strip. Send ‘em your favorite strip, and get ‘em hooked!)
3.) Strip Search: Do you have one strip or punchline that you absolutely love, and wish you could read right now? Search for it, using this feature!
4.) Strip Transcriptions: The new site features all 1500+ strips. Of these, only about 1/10th have had their dialogue transcribed so that they’re searchable. You can help, by transcribing strips, using these handy-dandy instructions. It's fun, too!
5.) Sheldon by E-mail: If you love your daily Sheldon, but can’t get to the site every day, why not let us e-mail it to you? Just fill out the yellow post-it note [above] with your e-mail, and you’re all signed up. We’ll be starting this free service next week, but sign up now so you don’t forget!
6.) Original Art: If you’ve ever wished you could buy the original art to your favorite Sheldon strip, now it’s super easy. Just click the text “Buy Today’s Original Art”, located under the strip you want, and bam, you own an original!
7.) Have you checked out the 6 years of archives?
All the extras on the site? The strip intro? The funniest video on YouTube? Click around…and check ‘em out!
---
Ooo…also…regarding today’s strip on “Heroes”. Heroes is a show that I completely dig, and which has me inescapably hooked.
Week to week, it’s consistently one of the most entertaining on TV, and is a master of the unexpected cliff-hanger or end-of-show reveal. And until it turns into this season’s “Lost” (and begins to metaphorically meander around the house in slippers, looking for it’s teeth), I’ll be a solid fan. But it is what it is: a blatant X-Men ripoff.
And I have no problem with that, per se. Shakespeare lifted from the Decameron, after all…creative “reimagining” isn’t new. But what does make me chuckle is chatting with folks who never read X-Men -- or who have never been introduced to the broader Marvel idea of the “persecuted mutant” -- and who think Heroes is the most brilliant concept ever birthed upon the world.
I tell ‘em…“Small Wonder”. Now THERE was a show that broke creative ground.
-Dave
PS: The beta-test at the Sheldon store ends tomorrow, so make sure to get your purchase in. And remember: when you treat yourself at the Sheldon store, you’re directly supporting the strip you love. So grab yourself a copy of “Pure Ducky Goodness” at $6 off: it’s the perfect time to show the love.
