Bogworld
Bogworld is a cartoon column that was originally published under the name Thinking out Loud prior to its introduction to the internet in the nineties. It was among one of the first cartoons to be published on the web via AOL Homepages. Since then, it has rebuilt it user-base globally and continues to grow larger every day.
A Brief History of the Author
Joseph Pillsbury always had a talent for drawing and he always had a pretty decent sense of humor. Way back when he was in high school he had the benefit of some really supportive teachers. They thought he was wasting away in the art class which was taught by the schools assistant hockey coach. So they made some phone calls and got him an interview at the Duluth News Tribune. At 17 years old he started doing editorial cartoons for the city’s main newspaper. Joseph was also doing regular cartoons for the fine folks over at TSR Hobbies (the fine folks behind Dungeons and Dragons) doing toons for their monthly magazine DRAGON. That allowed him to develop his skills as a cartoonist.
A Brief History of Bog
Bog actually began life as “Wog”. Wog was a small dinosaur character mistaken for a dragon in a medieval adventure strip Joseph was developing for a cartoon feature that he had hoped would eventually grace the pages of DRAGON magazine. Now being a northern Minnesota boy, Wog was just an abbreviation for Pollywog which is a baby frog. A good friend later pointed out that “Wog” was something really terrible to say to people from India so he changed the name to Bog. Again, after the swampy wetlands he tramped through as a kid which seemed like the likely place a prehistoric creature might live.
History of the Author, Joseph Pillsbury
When Joe graduated high school in 1982 he had been on the telephone trying to work out a deal with the fine folks at Disney and was drawing a comic strip and started submitting it to newspaper syndicates. The strip was something about life in the north woods of Minnesota since that’s where he grew up and what he knew.
In 1983, he started going to a small art college in St. Paul, Minnesota. Right before starting college, he caught the attention of Tribune Media Services. They liked his work enough to help him start to develop it and signed him to a contract. At the same time, the fine folks at Disney were urging him to get a more Disneyesque experience so he applied for work at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Joe ended up becoming an usher in their famous Omnitheater.
"Thinking out Loud"
Now working for a major museum he found myself inspired by the variety of bizarre, ancient and exotic displays and the very interesting people who work in a big city museum. He shifted the theme of his in-development cartoon strip to a museum theme and moved Bog from the medieval adventure to this project.
The new comic strip was called Thinking Out Loud. Something he sort of nabbed from the episode of Cheers where Cliff Claven said something hilariously stupid and then looked around at the other people sitting around him and said, “Sorry was that out loud?” Thinking Out Loud caught on with Tribune Media Services and they worked for months developing it trying to get it good enough to be in newspapers. This took months.
Thinking Out Loud finally went to a board of review where it missed being nationally syndicated by one vote. Joe worked with TMS for six more months and got his toon to their board of review a second time. Again it missed by one mere vote.
Joseph was very frustrated with the process by then. He continued to draw my strips but mainly for his friends. He started taking on more serious illustration jobs doing pieces for museums and corporations and he even did a maze game for the back of a KIX cereal box. But cartooning was where his heart was and he always felt he could have done something really cool if given the chance.
BogWorld on AOL Homepages
In the mid 90s the internet was really beginning to explode. Everyone had America Online and websites were popping up all over the place. Joe's brother suggested that he start posting his cartoons on my AOL homepage so friends and family could click in and enjoy them. He thought it would be a good way for people close to Joe to give me some feedback so he might become a better newspaper cartoonist.
Joe did that for about six months and was having a lot of fun with it right up until AOL sent him a notice that he had to shut down his cartoon site because it was exceeding the traffic that was allocated to free AOL homepages. Joe had never really tracked the traffic because he really only told his family and closest friends about the site. But they told their friends and their friends told their friends... etc... and eventually he had a pretty decent readership.
By that point, Joe was really hooked on the whole idea of web cartooning. And, from what he could tell, his strips were some of the first comics being presented on the internet.
The Launch of Bogworld.Com
Joe had a tech minded friend help him register a domain name. Thinking Out Loud was taken and since Bog had emerged as the lead character and the most fun for him to draw, he decided to make him the headliner. Joe registered Bogworld.com. He consulted with a lawyer friend to set up all of the necessary legal protection for his materials. He struggled to learn really basic HTML but with a lot of help from close friends created the pages and quickly launched the site.
Shortly after Bogworld.com launched, Tribune Media Services explored the idea of syndicating the strip to newspapers again. Bogworld appeared on their major cartoon website for a few months while they again reviewed it. Once more, they declined signing it on but by then Joe did not really care. He had learned to love web cartooning and loved the immediacy of responses he was getting for each cartoon over the internet. Something that he could never have if the cartoon was appearing only in newspapers.
The Beginning of the 2000's
Thanks to the nice exposure from being on the national Tribune Media website, Bogworld actually had a nice solid readership in the early 2000s. Joe was appearing on television and more than a few times on talk radio within the Twin Cities. Newspapers were writing articles about the strip. And, Joe had the joy of an having built an audience that was actually rivaling what many newspapers had; without the editorial demands of being told what he could and could not write about in his toons. Joseph Pillsbury was the boss of Bogworld. He found this freedom really inspiring and fun.
The Current State of Bogworld
Readership remained high for years until the company that hosted Bogworld suddenly went out of business. For months, Bogworld went “off the air” while Joe struggled to prove sole ownership of the domain (turns out some server company put their name as part owner of your domain sometimes when they set things up for you...). After that got cleared up Bogworld had lost most of its readership. Only a handful of loyal readers found Bogworld when it re-emerged. Joe was faced with the task of building the strips readership from nearly the ground up again.
Fortunately, Joe enlisted the help of his friend, Tyler Harvey, owner and operator of a company called Red Cellar. He'd had some great friends help him get Bogworld on the net. But, Tyler has been a dynamo about getting the site looking and performing the way he had always hoped it might. Due to the clever use of networking sites and search engines, Bogworld is rapidly growing a readership larger than it has ever had before.