Thanks to your interest and my cajoling, the numbers for A&J have been great the past few days at GoComics.com, and they weren’t all that bad before. Thank you for your support. You’ve been very kind, but I will admit to some ambivalence about my part. In the past, I’d have thought of such direct involvement by me as stuffing the ballot box. There was a time, in the early days of online participation, when I’d refrain from encouraging my readers to vote in any newspaper comics poll that might come to the collective attention. Perhaps that was extreme, but I always wanted the work to speak for itself. Ultimately, the quality of one’s work also reigns supreme in the digital world, but self promotion has a larger role. There are far fewer traveling salesmen with fat expense accounts beseeching harried newspaper editors on behalf of syndicated cartoonists such as myself. It might not seem like it when I come here and plead for attention, but this self promotion doesn’t come easily for me. I think maybe I really am an old dog. I’m going to finish this thought tomorrow, and then, I swear, we’ll be off this topic for a while.
