George is a comic strip that has languished on the world wide web since…well, technically, since the late 1990s. 1999, to be exact. The Matrix was hot property at the cinema, Lou Bega was causing wonder with his one hit, and a young SpongeBob Squarepants was making waves in Bikini Bottom. So then did a rascally little webcomic gain its first home on that primordial website soup known as Geocities. Oh, sure, the drawings were a little crude, the jokes were a little childish, and the website was created in bare-bones HTML.
But still, the nascent George comic strip, then having only existed until that point in a couple of small local newspapers, was given life on the Internet, well before the days of Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder. It wasn’t until January 2005, however, that the strip moved from the warm cradle of Geocities to the bright, confusing world of standalone websites. In those days, George had to make his home at the grotesquely hyphenated domain name of george-comics.com, since georgecomics.com was already registered to a comics and collectibles enthusiast who happened to also share the moniker “George.” But, sure enough, my eagle eye one day paid off when said comics enthusiast let his domain registration lapse, and I snapped it up and moved the site over.
George continued unabated for a few more years before then going on an indefinite hiatus, during which time the domain name expired and was purchased by an Icelandic investment firm. George seemed to finally be cold and buried. But a chance DNS search in 2022 revealed that the investment had not paid off in spades for this Icelandic venture capitalist, who again, allowed georgecomics.com’s registration to lapse. In my infinite wisdom and nostalgia, I decided to grab the domain again, in case someday I ever wanted to exhume George’s corpse and puppet it around in a macabre marionette. Which is exactly what I eventually did.
Now, as I write this in late 2024, the first new George comic strips in 14 years have been transferred from the slowly-firing synapses of my smooth-walled brain to the digital canvas of my iPad Pro, which features more computing power than I’ll ever house in my aging noggin. I decided to breathe new life back into the husk of George comics, caring little as to whether it’s actually read by anyone–it just feels good to have these old characters (and I do mean old, they have time-jumped the 14 year gap with the rest of us) stretching their aching joints and applying salves to their burning muscles. I promise to never let the website go again, at least not until I tire of it and allow it to be purchased by a Southeast Asian fishing boat captain who looks to use it to promote his vast empire. Perhaps, in 14 years time after that, George will again rise from his ashen grave, shaking off the accumulated years before dancing in a pantomime of his past greatness.
I’ll see you there!
- John Norton