Since I haven’t posted this stuff in a while, you can also follow my comic stuff through:

• The Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/systemcomic
• My personal Twitter @Rosscott
• The comic’s Twitter @Systemcomic
• Tumblr: http://rosscott.tumblr.com/
• RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/systemcomic (you can call that my RoSS feed)

Coming TONIGHT to The Ottobar in Balitmore is our big HOMECOMING SHOW. After a summer in LA, Tennessee, DC, and Philly we return to our home base with a can of Natty Boh in our hands and a nerdcore rap song in our hearts. Details from Super Art Fight’s site:

Super Art Fight LIVE! at The Ottobar
Saturday, September 7th, 2013 – 8pm Doors, 9pm Show

The Ottobar
2549 North Howard Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Admission: $15 (All Ages Show) – Tickets ON SALE NOW!

Facebook RSVP: Right Here!

The Card For The Evening:

Super Art Fight Championship: Jamie “Angry Zen Master” Noguchi defends against Kelsey “Killer” Wailes

SAF Tag Titles: Team Sexyfulness (The Baron & Duchess Von Sexyful) defend against Ashley “Markermancer” Katz & El Russo Rojo

Ghostfreehood takes on “Charm City Shinobi” Dann Malihom

Super Art Fight Title #1 Contender’s Bout: Red Erin battles Jamie “Brawlin’” Baldwin

Also Appearing:

• Your Super Art Fight Hosts Marty Day & Ross Nover
• Live DJing from The Megadrives

Musical Guests:

Adam WarRock

Tribe One

In case you’re semi-new to my site and wondering why I’m posting about Super Art Fight, I’m one of the owners / MC’s / design director of the thing. It is something very close to my heart that I absolutely love, and if you ever get the chance to attend one you very much should.

Ross Nover – A Dose of Design Inspiration from Comic Strips from Refresh DC on Vimeo.

Earlier this week I gave what might be the most Ross-like talk I could possibly think of. It’s all about what designers can learn from their cousins the comic artists. I got to touch on some points like closure, verbal/visual pairings, art as exercise, and poop jokes. I’m really happy with how it went and so happy to see it online!

It was a part of Refresh DC, which is a group of my peers of designers and developers in the DC area. I’m pretty proud of it and was honored to be able to speak at such an event.

I tried to make it as accessible as I could to designers and non-designers, and also give credit where it’s due. With that in mind, thanks to Olly Moss, Caldwell Tanner, Danielle Corsetto, Jamie Noguchi, Steve Napierski, Ananth Pasdlfkjksjdf;j, Randal Munroe, Shannon Wheeler, Frank Chimero, 3eanuts and Garfield Minus Garfield, Alex Robinson, Jeph Jacques, Jessica Hische, Carolyn Sewell, Noah Scalin, Austin Kleon, my friends at Super Art Fight, the American University Design Program (whose resources evolved into this presentation), and Scott McCloud. (Did I miss anyone?)

The audio is passable, but the exposure kills the projector so you may have to follow along in the SlideShare (this is the link to that).

If you watch any or all of it, let me know what you think! And if you are looking for someone to talk about comics and design, just let me know.

Over at the site Archive Crawl, they reviewed The System. While the overall review did not love the comic, it features this amazing quote:

If you find yourself with excess time that needs to be legally disposed of, you could do a lot worse.

I think that’s going on the book jacket.

UPDATE: The feed has not been working for some people. As far as I can tell this is due to the lag it takes to slowly get it all to feed / propogate. The link that should work is http://feeds.feedburner.com/systemcomic . This now works for me to add it to Google Reader, let me know if you’re having trouble.

Howdy, Systemics! I don’t know what you think goes on behind the scenes of this comic, but I’m going to try and start being a little more up front and see how that goes. Hopefully you guys appreciate seeing how things really work here either as fellow creators, voyeuristic readers, or just because you like reading crap while you’re bored at work.

Did you know I would like to make money off this comic? I know, that’s crazy talk. The first part of that comment you should realize is that right now, I don’t make money off this comic.  Sure the HilariAwesome store is available and I get a sale or two a month, but the only real revenue ever seen is when I go to conventions and get to deal things in bulk. I love doing that, but it would be great if the site at least paid for it’s own hosting, maybe even a little extra. That could really take the edge off and help justify the time I put into things around here, as well as help out with the upcoming site redesign and The System Book 1 printing costs. So I’m trying to optimize / revitalize the way I try and make some cash on the site.

No, I’m not going to start charging for the content you’re used to getting for free. But If I can find ways to get the site to pay for itself or maybe even earn me a few bucks without having to inconvenience you the reader too badly, I figure I should give it a shot. As such, today starts the Great Feed Experiment. I would like to be pretty up front about this so here are all the details:

Readership on this comic is around 3,000 – 5,000 readers a day, depending on which stat tracker I look at, what sites are linking to me, what StumbleUpon feels like doing, and what I’ve been doing to update lately. It’s been there for over 6 months and it’s a great number though I’m not a fan of the plateau. From what I understand a comic running under 2 years this is a great number. I’m certainly proud of it, though of course it would always be nice if it was growing. Unfortunately, it’s not a big enough number for web ads to really do that much good. You need orders of magnitude more in the way of readers or amazing ad networks to do anything near good money with ad traffic.

However, there’s a silver lining. For a site this size, we have a HUGE number of RSS feed subscribers. Google Reader alone shows 1,398 followers as I write this, which as far as I can tell is really big for a site this size. That’s only the Google Reader ones, not to mention people subscribing through other means. After talking it over with my internet brother from another mother Marty, I’d like to know more about it and possibly utilize it a little bit, so as of today I’m starting to run the feed through FeedBurner to better track how many people are subscribing, and adding Google Adsense to the feed. I know that Adsense is one of the worst ad networks in terms of revenue because they are so general, but it’s a start until I can get on some better networks.

If you are a subscriber through the RSS and something I’ve done in this process has effected the way you read the comic and made you want to STOP reading the comic, let me know. (systemcomic at gmail) I’d rather have readers than money hands down. (systemcomic at gmail) If it is simply messing with the way you read the comic or possibly breaking anything, let me know that too. (systemcomic at gmail) I’ve tested and it seems to all be working but I won’t know for sure until you tell me what’s going on.

Anyway, thanks for understanding and of course reading the comic. It’s often easy to forget that looking at the numbers relates to real people who have taken time every day to follow what I write / draw here, which is why I always encourage you to get in touch with me. (systemcomic at gmail) Hopefully we are all building to something together. As it says in the masthead, comics will keep being posted until morale improves.

Thanks all.  Feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments, message me on The Twitters, or email me at, you guessed it, (systemcomic at gmail).

The site Luprand’s Webcomic Musings recently reviewed The System (THE REVIEW CLICK HERE). While not the most favorable review in the world, they clearly are a fan enough to write a review and link a whole bunch of their favorite / least favorite comics.  The summary?

Four rounded panels and a load of snark.

Can’t disagree with that.  He also reviews some of my friends (Crooked Gremlins, Amu’s World, Paradigm Shift) and seems to have a thing against poop jokes.  To each his own I suppose.

In the past when people have reviewed The System, you Systemics have jumped to my defense and gone short of going after the reviewer.  I appreciate the love Systemics, but there’s no need. Feel free to discuss with him on his site or here the points he makes, but keep it classy.  Systemics are a classy bunch.

Happy 300!

I know in the past I’ve done big recap comics for The System 100 and The System 200.  Expect that tradition to continue, but I couldn’t do it in time for today*.  It’ll just have to be posted under another number.  Still, thank you all to each of you who reads the comic.  I like to look at the numbers and stats (some would say too much) and think about how that is individual people enjoying commiserating with what is going on here.  If anyone has any suggestions for comics from the last 100 that need to be “called out” in the big recap comic, let me know in the comments of this post.

By the way, did you know you can buy prints of this or any other comic?  Check out the new online store for that and all things The System, Hilariawesome.com. Find Jimmy the Murderdog, comic prints, bike sniper shirts, and even HELL Vetica.

In the meantime, thanks again, Systemics.  It’s been a year and a half of awesome, and I can’t wait to take it further.

*Btw, thanks to Systemic @AngelicHapa who suggested I use this old tweet as inspiration for today’s comic. Thanks for following me on Twitter, and for the idea!

A while back, @POWCGeek put out on Twitter a call for webcomics to review.  “Why not?” I thought.  Apparently, this is why not.

Three pieces of good news, Systemics!

1.  Ben of Three Panel Opera has interviewed me for a series called “Questions for Artists Who Are Awesome”. Since I embody both artist-ness and awesomeness, it makes for a good read. Go read it now, and while you’re at it read his comic. It’s about kids and their odd imaginary friends that won’t go away.

2.  Go binge our archive. Have you ever felt that seeing almost 300 comics in the archive is just too much to deal with? Have you ever wished there was a better way to dig through that huge archive? Well the wonderful folk at Archive Binge have made it possible to set up a custom RSS feed that lets you start at the beginning, set a pace, and read the entire archive of some of your favorite webcomics. There are some huge* comics like Goats, XKCD, Wondermark, and of course myself. So click on over and sign up.

*Huge in your hearts, not in readership.

3. There is now a Comic Archive page to this here website. Click on over and see all the comics you want, now easily navigatable in some sort of chronological-type order.

July 8th, 2008.  I write the first ever System comic*.  In the weeks that followed, I began writing two comics a day, all in hopes of having a 30-comic archive by the time I went to Connecticon, in order to proudly have a comic after a year of having no reason to refer to myself as a webcomic artist.

*Don’t get snarky with me, I back dated the first couple posts so I could move things along faster.  As such, I’m calling today the “anniversary”.

We’ve come a long way since then.  Thanks to some humble links from friends made along the way, support of family and friends, and of course the excessive free time of you Systemics, The System has grown into part of both your life and mine.  I’ve done a lot of thanks for all your help throughout the site, but I will do it once more because it couldn’t be a what it is without you coming back.  As my way of saying thank you, we’re having a new contest on the site.

Jimmy the Murderdog Fan Art Contest

Grown out of a hair-brained idea written in a room with high temperatures and no ventilation, Jimmy the Murderdog has become a sort of mascot for The System.  Here’s your chance to show your love for the murderdog that shows only murderous tendencies to others.

1. Draw your interpretation of Jimmy the Murderdog.  It can be a sketch, a refined drawing, or even an all-out comic.  It can be impressionist, a realistic interpretation, or made out of stained glass.  Really, just go nuts with it.
2. Email it in to: systemcomic at gmail, subject: HE’LL GET YOU.  You have until Midnight (the end of) Sunday, August 2nd.
3. The winner (chosen by me based on however I’m feeling) will receive a Jimmy the Murderdog T-Shirt, a Jimmy the Murderdog 13″ x 19″ poster, and a The System pin set! And, of course, all other Systemics will know that you, as winner, reign supreme.

Want some ideas to get your creative juices flowing?  Luckily for you, I’ve received to “star entries” from some fellow internet peeps.

This first one is by Charles Snow of Sordid City Blues.

Our friend Noah over at Skull A Day has gone a little more elaborate outside the box, with this amazing photograph.  Hey, I never said you had to draw it.  Click the image to see it bigger, btw.

Hopefully this opens your brains to some possibilities.  Remember, comic, drawing, or anything else you come up with to interpret Jimmy the Murderdog.  Email me with questions.  So get to work, Systemics!