The Goat Returns

So, Bob the Goat.

Most of the people reading the comic now weren't reading it during my original run back during my college days in Arkansas. I just emailed comics out three days a week to my friends and family. Worked pretty well, because they had a free comic delievered right to their inbox, and I got to amuse and entertain folks.

One of the characters that I used back then was Bob the Goat. I actually developed him back in high school, just as I did most of the other characters. Bob was inspired by a friend of mine in a concurrent class I was taking up at St. Gregory's University. He had an old Adam Sandler audio clip as the startup noise for his computer ("I am a simple goat, I live in the back of a pickup truck"), and that led me to draw a goat-like thing that wore pants and shoes and stood upright. Of course, we had to name it "Bob." And for several years there, then, I slipped Bob into comics.

He was originally Simon's (then named Joey, for some bizarre reason) pet, though God only knows where I came up with that idea, and he tended to eat anything and everything (especially Simon's books). This led to a couple of amusing jokes, but the character struck me as a little one-dimensional, a one-note joke character with no development, blah blah blah. So when we did the big revamp for the move to Keenspace back in 2003, I decided to ditch poor Bob in favor of incorporating characters like Tim Tation and Tammy the Succubus into the cast.

But then a few weeks ago, an old friend of mine from high school, Trevor, won a little contest where he got a free piece of art from me. And he'd mentioned he missed Bob the Goat, so I drew ol' Bob for him and mailed it off. And that got me thinking...thinking about the poor character I'd discarded, left for dead on a piece of paper shoved in a sketchbook. And I decided to revive Bob, to give him a home once more.

Because let's face it: goats are damn funny.