Silly Daddy hits 500 Comics Online

500 webcomics is still a pretty tough milestone on the road of webcomics.  And perserverence in comics is nothing to sneeze at. Congrats to Joe Chiappetta on 500 installments of his all-ages family webcomic Silly Daddy!  Here’s the press release:

The family comic series, "Silly Daddy," posts its 500th online cartoon November 9th, 2009. Started as a print comic book in 1991 with the birth of his first child, cartoonist Joe Chiappetta has received much award recognition for the series, including Harvey and Ignatz nominations. When his story arc combined science fiction with real life family drama and humor, he won the Xeric Award.

Since 2004, Silly Daddy has also been a webcomic with an emphasis on one panel cartoons. Here are five reasons why you should take note of Silly Daddy’s 500 webcomics milestone:

  1. Silly Daddy is one of the longest running autobiographical comics still releasing new material. It’s definitely the longest running autobiographical comic about family by a father.
  2. While the all-ages webcomics are drawn on a variety of media, Chiappetta is one of the only cartoonists to regularly complete comics on a Pocket PC (handheld mobile computing devices with 4" diagonal screen or less, running Windows Mobile operating system).
  3. Many of these webcomics (74) were created entirely on a mobile phone. Chiappetta is the first cartoonist to pioneer in this field of phone-made webcomics, calling it "telephomics."
  4. The Silly Daddy website is one of the few cartoonist sites wherein all the comics are fully accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Every webcomic posted has a described narrative that assistive technology software (such as JAWS or ZoomText) can read to the viewer.
  5. Roughly half of the 500 comics are works on paper and the other half were drawn entirely on some type of computer device. It took 5 years to make these webcomics and cost $2000 in materials to produce.

I’m not sure about number 1 (Isn’t Kochalka a father?) actually — you’ll have to fact check the others on your own.

Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.