Life on the Fourth Floor

A sitcomic

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My Legacy

Aug15
by David Bishop on 15th August 2017 at 04:30
Posted In: Blog

After I die my surviving family members are going to unlock my phone and find it full of self-portraits taken whilst drawing for facial reference, most of them taken early in the morning or late at night. Then they’ll come to the heartbreaking realisation that they don’t have a lot of photos of me doing anything else.

“What was your Great-granddad Bishop like?”

“Well, son, I was fairly young when he died but I like to look at these old photo albums and picture what his day-to-day life must have been like. Not a fan of showering, no sir, but he did like sitting in the dark in his pyjamas, taking selfies and making weird monster faces.”

“Uh… forget I asked.”

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Top Webcomics

Jul18
by David Bishop on 18th July 2017 at 23:05
Posted In: Blog

Uh-oh. I’ve just realised something. Well, the robot butler that lives inside Google Analytics realised… I’m getting some good traffic from TopWebComics.com.

For those of you unfamiliar with the TWC site, it’s basically a ranked list of webcomics and you can vote for your favourite comics to increase their ranking.

Now before I go any further I have to say that as a fan of webcomics, personally, I don’t give a crap about how popular they are or how well they do compared to other comics. And when cartoonists get too hung up on this or that aspect of the webcomic community, whatever that means, it just comes across as petty. For this reason the idea of a site that categorises, compares and ranks webcomics doesn’t appeal to me. Sorry, to be honest, I should say it doesn’t appeal to me anymore. There have been times in the past when I’ve fallen into that trap. It was many years ago, it wasn’t a good colour on me and I’d prefer to leave that in the past.

So to recap, yours truly is ambivalent about TopWebComics.com, ambivalent about becoming internet famous.

However, if you’re a fan of the comic you should care about how many other fans I have, even if I don’t. Rather, you should care about how many fans all the comics you read have, especially if (like this one) the author is still working a day job. More fans mean more success. More success mean less time wasted on the day job, more time devoted to the comic and more frequent updates.

A webcomic made by a part-time or hobbyist cartoonist lives or dies by its fans. I’m not talking about readers, I’m talking about fans. You can have a lot of the former but none of the latter and still fail. Fans are readers who like the comic so much they want to see more of it. Fans will go out of their way to support a comic, they will help it reach more fans so it can grow and update more.

So when I say I’m getting good traffic from TopWebComics.com, I’m not getting a lot of visitors from that site, but the ones who are visiting are the good kind, the kind that stick around and become fans.

Do you realise what this means? How many votes a comic gets on TopWebComics.com does make a difference, and isn’t just petty nonsense for stupid-heads. I take it all back, TWC! Wait, it’s possible I never publicly said that in the first place. Well, I took it back before I even said it. I pretracted it.

Now, this doesn’t mean whatever comic is at the top of the list is the best in the world. But even though my position is far from the top, I’m already benefiting in a small way from being on the site, and I’ve largely ignored TWC for the 12 years my webcomic has been running.

It’s actually a useful marketing platform. And I’ve ignored it for 12 years. Oops.

So how am I doing on there? Well, at time of writing I’m ranked at number 2558 on the list. To put that in perspective, number 2557 is a Comic Genesis comic that hasn’t updated since 2011.

So the higher a cartoonist can get himself on this list, the more opportunities to reach new readers he has. It wouldn’t even be about reaching the top 100 list — just doing a little better could potentially have a massive impact, especially for unsung masterpieces still waiting to find their audience. I’m being coy — I am of course talking about the 2011 Comic Genesis guy. His material about Obama’s first term has never been more relevant.

Now, I’m not going to start shamelessly grubbing for votes like this shit is the most important thing ever. But this thing is important, more important than I gave it credit for. So if you could vote for me as often as possible that would be a tremendous help. I’d be very grateful and you would be helping to support the site in a way that has real monetary value to me whilst costing you nothing. So, cheaper than throwing a dollar into the tip jar but potentially just as valuable.

For my part, I’m going to start posting voting incentives. Right now, if you vote for the strip on TWC you can see a high-quality sneak preview of the next strip, but please let me know in the comments what incentives you’d like to see. You can also reach me on Twitter and Facebook. I’m always happy to chat. If you want more frequent incentives or different incentives, just let me know.

You can vote once per device per day. So I’m going to vote for myself on my phone and my laptop once a day — that’s 60 votes a month right there. Let’s see how far we can take this. I appreciate the help.

Peace out. Much love. Many thanks.

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Update to Update Schedule: Fortnightly is a Fun Word to Say

May01
by David Bishop on 1st May 2017 at 04:30
Posted In: Blog

On April first of this year, with no fanfare, Life on the Fourth Floor started updating twice a month. From now on the comic will update on the 1st and the 15th of every month. We’re coming to the end of the current storyline, which will wrap up this summer. If you’ve been following along this whole time, first of all: thank you. Second of all, you may have noticed that the current story arc is more like a series of stand-alone gag strips that go together to form a narrative when viewed as a whole. At least, that’s the shape I was going for. This structure, combined with the fact that the art has never looked better, means that there’s never been a better time to tell people about the strip.

If you know somebody who would like what we’re doing here, please let them know today and tell them this is their jumping-on point. I’m still working the day job and doing this in my spare time, so any help you can give me in reaching a wider audience would be greatly appreciated.

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Oh Yeah, Didn’t I Mention?

Aug29
by David Bishop on 29th August 2015 at 11:58
Posted In: Blog

Recently, I launched my new site and, with it, my new Patreon page.

If you clicked the Patreon link (and thank you if you did) you will have seen an adorable picture of my baby boy.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen a picture of the ultrasound scan that we later came to realise was of the same baby boy.

I suppose if you saw both the ultrasound and the Patreon, by now you’ve put two and two together and worked out that at some point between then and now a baby was born. My first child. And I utterly failed to announce it.

It’s not like by not telling you I was deliberately not telling you. I mean, it wasn’t a conscious decision. It wasn’t a secret. I fully intended to announce that my son had been born. I mean, I wouldn’t just tweet an ultrasound and then not announce the subsequent baby — who does that?

I made a blog post about getting married, I blogged about moving house, I even blogged about getting a new job, I was going to blog about the birth. I was.

In good time.

I mean come on, I wasn’t going to live tweet the labour or anything. You’ve got to leave a respectful distance between the events themselves and the mass publicising of said events. I was just waiting for the dust to settle.

If you don’t wait, it seems like you had the baby just so you could blog about it or something.

So, here was my plan: I would wait a bit and then, when the time was ripe, I was going to collect my thoughts and share some wise words with you, things I learnt from becoming a dad.

But then, a day after he was born my son was… well, he wasn’t 100% healthy. Nothing very serious, only life-threatening in the sense that to newborn babies everything is potentially life-threatening. Little guy just needed a little colour in his cheeks. A couple of extra days in the hospital and he was fine. He was fine.

But (and in retrospect it’s funny to me now) in the hospital a kind of certainty elbowed its way into my brain. It was an ancient, primal feeling. It was like two parts parental protective instinct and one part mental-illness-level anxiety. I was possessed by a ghoulish certainty that my son would die. Not even in a dramatic sense, or a dreadful premonition, more like a numb resignment. Almost like my life was a badly-written film and, ten minutes after the opening credits, I could already predict the ending. Yeah, okay, that’s how the story goes, they lose the baby. Real original, guys.

Of course he was fine. We took our healthy baby home and then it was just a question of settling into a routine. Waking up every two hours to manage his various biological processes, trying to fit wriggly little arms through the oversized sleeves of onesies he would grow out of in just a few weeks, typical dad stuff.

I had been waiting for the dust to settle, but it never did settle. My normally predictable life had been upended. I had been changed. My priorities had been dumped out, reshuffled and replaced like unalphebatised books. No, that’s not it.

My brain was rewired. Although that’s not entirely it either. Rewired implies a deliberate process. An escaped chimpanzee had pulled out all the wires and then the zookeeper came and plugged them back in again so as not to get into trouble.

I burst into tears holding a tiny pair of socks. Dear Zoo became the greatest work of literature I had ever read by virtue of the fact that I was reading it to my child, and the monkey in the book looked so much like him. Watching him sleep, I kept feeling this severe ache, like indigestion but deep in my chest. It felt as though looking at my son was literally hurting my heart. I didn’t even want to feel that way, but of course I didn’t want it to stop either.

And that feeling of morbid foreboding, that suspicion that I was about to walk into a room and find him dead?

It never left me.

It’s just become more sophisticated. I no longer think he’s just going to stop working for no reason like a broken toy. Now I’m rationalising it. He’s going to get too hot or too cold. He’s going to suffocate himself on one of his soft toys or on a plastic bag. I’ll go into check on him during a nap and he won’t be moving and I’ll just know it. It’s over, it couldn’t last. How could it last?

Because that’s not how stories work. And my anxiety is, has always been, a storyteller looking for narrative clues.

I am ridiculously, almost comically happy right now. Everything in my life is painted with a veneer of inarguable greatness. So when I reflect on the story of my life, the part with my marriage and my son is the main storyline and everything leading up to that point was the backstory that gets revealed through dialogue and short flashbacks.

So we know, as an audience, what to expect. The happy couple with the cute baby don’t just stay happy. I’ve seen this movie, that baby dies 20 minutes in and it becomes a downbeat drama about coping with tragedy and learning to let go.

I think this more than anything prevented me from making a blog post in those first couple of months. Because you don’t want to publish happy news like that and then have to publish a retraction. Oops, sorry guys. Never mind. He died.

That’s going to look bad in the news section of your light-hearted humour comic.

I told myself just needed to wait until I felt normal. I can’t write unless I feel normal. But the fear still gripped me, so I didn’t write, I kept waiting instead.

Then, while I was waiting, I stopped being able to sleep like a normal person on account of having to rouse myself every two hours to pick up a tiny creature that was either hungry, had just pooped, or both. Or neither of those things but he wouldn’t stop crying anyway.

By the time I was able to work on creative comic website things, other stuff had to take a priority. Working ahead of the update schedule, getting the new site up, writing my speech for my brother’s wedding. A baby announcement was the last thing on my mind. Then, when I did think of it the thought was always wrapped in a blanket of guilt over having left the announcement so long.

Then there’s the other side of it. What do you even say?

For starters, the bar has already been set ridiculously high by Jerry Holkins’s post announcing the birth of his first son.

If you’ve never read it for yourself, you owe it to yourself to click that little link up there and take it in.

You certainly don’t deserve to have the experienced spoiled for you by me discussing it, so maybe step away, read that, return. We’ll pick up where we left off.

Okay?

Good, you’re back.

It’s lovely, isn’t it?

It’s just a moment of surprising tenderness that still gets me. It gets me long after the surprise should have worn off. Reading it, just now, for the purposes of writing about it, I’m not embarrassed to say that I welled up. I cry a little bit every time I read it.

That’s the truth. It’s this part, right at the end:

“I very nearly buckled. Not struck dumb, but struck, as a string might be struck, into sound:

It’s me, I said. I’m the one who sang to you.”

Just reading that part by itself doesn’t do it, but if I read the whole thing down to that part makes me cry. It’s like a magic spell, it’s like that one note that makes people soil themselves. I know it’s coming, but I still…

When I read that for the first time ten years ago, I realised I wanted to be a father. I’m not saying it’s the reason I became a father. I’m not saying finding a cartoonist’s blog post touching qualifies you for the job. And a lot of other things before that point and after it contributed to the decision.

But that moment was one moment in a chain of dominos that fell, tipped over a row of books, cute the rope, sent up the balloon which tugged against the switch operating the fan, and so forth. Then at the end of that process was my baby son.

I even showed it to my wife, when she was still just my girlfriend. She said it was good.

“Good?” I spluttered. “It’s beautiful. I cry every time I read it.”

“Aww.”

So I start thinking about what I might say when I hold my son for the first time, that I will later write down in this very blog post.

Needless to say, I’m not a good enough writer to craft anything as powerful as “I’m the one who sang to you,” even if I had ten years to write it. Well, I did have ten years. I had 28 years and change. But I didn’t want to think it up in advance. I was just going to wait until I held him and see what happened.

But in the meantime, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of words they would be. Stern acknowledgement? A grunt of approval? A silly joke? Something profound? Advice? Words of welcome?

What would my first words to my son say about me as a father? What kind of character would I be in the story of his life? The faithful friend? The wise mentor? The relationship character he reconciles with at the end? You hope you won’t be the antagonist, but you never know. Because my anxiety is a storyteller.

I’m not going to be the character who voices his worries. I don’t want to be C-3P0 telling Han Solo the odds of survival. I’m not worried about how much I worry. The persistent pangs of fear, the groundless suspicion that he’s about to die? I’ve asked other parents. Every parent I’ve asked has reported the same feelings.

I asked my father when it stops. “It never stops,” he told me.

It turns out the mysterious mental illness I seem to have contracted is called parenthood.

So I’m holding him for the first time. I wait for lightning to strike.

Nothing comes.

I grope for something to say. Anything.

“Hi,” I say. It comes out as a croak. “Hi Ted.” Then, feeling like more is needed, “It’s me, daddy.”

“He’s the one who sang to you,” my wife says.

God damn it, Katie. “Yes,” I grudgingly admit, “I’m the one who sang to you.”

I know what kind of character I am now. I’m the comic relief.

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Ten Years and Counting

Jul23
by David Bishop on 23rd July 2015 at 06:00
Posted In: Blog

I have a habit of downplaying or accidentally forgetting the arbitrary webcomic milestones I reach, but this one was too big to ignore.

Ten Years

Words can’t describe, or at least they can’t describe well, the joy, the pride and the tremendous gratitude I feel today. That’s because it is ten years today since I started this comic strip, meaning I’ve been doing this essentially my entire adult life so far plus about three years.

To celebrate, I’m launching a brand new website! Let me walk you through it.

Talk to Me, Talk to Other Readers

We’ve now got a comments section and integration for Twitter and Facebook.

Never before has it been so easy to connect with other people who like the strip, or with me. And it’s never been easier to share the comic with your friends. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

I’ve Launched a Patreon

Patreon

If I can be uncomfortably super honest for a second, it was really hard for me to make a Patreon account because I have something like a pathological aversion to asking anyone for help, with anything.

I made it ten years without a helping hand, I  reasoned, so why would I need one now?

But I’m starting to appreciate how dumb that is. None of this is possible without other people. My wife, for example, helps a great deal by supporting a husband who sets his alarm for 4:30 in the morning every day and draws all evening. And without readers spreading the word, the comic’s audience would never have grown bigger than the one person who was making it — it was all word of mouth.

The fact is some people want to help out, I need to be more gracious in my acceptance of help, and crowdfunding paltforms like Patreon are a great opportunity for each of us to do those things.

Here’s how I talked myself into making the page — I told myself I’m just setting out a tip jar on the counter. Nobody’s under any obligation to put anything in there, just like you’re not under any obligation to tip your waiter. And that’s speaking as someone who spent a year working as a waiter in England, the land where people don’t tip for absolutely everything, and specifically in a cheap chain restaurant in Yorkshire, where 90% of customers were Mr-Pink-ing it up and not leaving so much as a penny.

Yet, through hard work and kissing a lot of butt, the tips I did earn eventually made the difference between saving up enough money to move to the big city where I got a better job and still being trapped there now.

What I’m saying is, I’ve seen first hand how pocket change can change your life.

Maybe nothing will come of it, but then I thought the same thing about the comic itself ten years ago.

People are always asking me to update more often. Well, becoming a patron practically guarantees that I will. Let’s see how far we can take this.

A Bigger, Better Strip
I’ve reposted the entire archive 10% bigger on the new site. It now looks much better on phones than it did before and the image quality is generally nicer. My little gift to you.

But wait, there’s more! We’ve now got a chapter-based archive page that lists comics by name, date and the ‘episode’ they fall into.

Finally, because I love you that much, I’ve cleaned up some of the earlier comics, focusing in particular on ones that suffered from readability issues. That’s three ways the archives are more readable than they’ve ever been before.

What do you think?
Let me know what you think in the comments! That’s the first time I’ve been able to say that!

Obviously, with this being a brand new site on new servers, things are going to be a little shaky. Stuff will break.

Worst of all, I might not be paying for a high enough level of web hosting yet (this is my first time doing this) so the sheer amount of traffic on the site might cause the whole damn thing to fall over.

If that happens, I need you to tell me straight away so I can fork out for the next level up.

In fact, if anything like that happens, reach me here in the comments, by e-mail, on Twitter or on Facebook and I’ll fix it as soon I can.

Thanks, and thanks for ten years of the most fun I’ve ever had!

└ Tags: anniversaries, announcement, how the f did I make it this far, milestones, new site, Patreon, ten years, thanks, warm fuzzy feelings
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