Business Casual

First, this is now part 10 of my holiday storyline that started back on December 13. I originally thought that I could end this story on December 31, but I felt that the story needed another week to properly wrap things up.

Now that that's out of the way, I want to give the yearly state of Business Casual address. I'm not going to go into great detail about things so if anyone would like me to expound on a topic further, I'd be more than happy to reply in the comments or through email. For today, I'm just going to stick to some recap of the comic. I'll hit some convention recaps on Wednesday, and on Friday, I want to give a outlook for 2011.

The Comic

2010 was the second year in which I created comics three times a week. And, when you take into account the fact that I didn't run any guest strips this year, I created more Business Casual comics this year than I had ever created before (157 of them!) So did anything happen in the comic? A few things actually.

- Toby and Jill met and started dating.
- The Boss tried to use an office pool as an object lesson.
- The office had a break-in that was an exercise in futility all around.
- Pete reprised his role as Bernard.

The rest of the year was filled with the usual assortment of befuddling business practices and office hijinks.

I had some the usual assortment of highs and lows with the comic. For the first year that I've created this comic, the traffic basically stagnated. I've never had an explosive growth with the comic, but there was always discernable growth.

The Book!

At long last, I finally published the first collection of Business Casual into a book. I had been trying to get this off the ground for years, and it was very gratifying to see the completed collection. There were a lot of new pains that I discovered in printing a book, and I cringe when I had to look at my early attempt at art and humor. But it's completed. It's in the store. And if I think that there's enough demand for another volume, I'll create another one.

The Other

Along with my Business Casual work, I completed my first mini comic this year with a 16 page mini comic called Infinite Loop. It was my first attempt at an actual story, and I was happy with how it turned out. I hope to create more of these as it's a good change of pace from the comic. I also completed another 24 Rusty The Wonderdog comics for the 24 Hour Comic Challenge.

The Bottom Line

So, really, it was a mixed year for the comic. I had some big achievements like the book, getting another guest comic published at FMyLife (WARNING: Site is potentially not work safe), and creating some fun stories. But I also fell into a rut at times, nearly missed making some comic deadlines (and almost ruining my 3 year plus streak of not missing an update), and didn't finish several projects that I wanted to complete. So was last year a success? I don't know. There were some accomplishments, but I just feel like I should have done more.

...coming Wednesday, Part 2 (Convention Recaps)