About Inside Joke

Left to right: Ryan Allen, Mindy Kandinsky, Matt McHenry, Roboduck, and Robot

Inside Joke was my poorly-named and poorly-executed first attempt at a comic strip, which I started publishing on the internet long before it was ready. I jumped from Tripod to Geocities, and was never never happy with either free host. Then Keenspace came along, and Inside Joke moved there.

It continued updating with approximate regularity (sort of) until I started working more in print, at which point the site just kind of did the Keenspace thing and sat there forever. Eventually, the main page was replaced with a quick note promising that someday, in the far-flung future, Inside Joke would return to the internet.

Meanwhile, I eventually decided Inside Joke was a terrible name. I mean, it was! Seriously! So while I was at the University of Northern British Columbia, I changed the name to Inside Joke University, which was (barely) an improvement (kind of). Later still, it became Educationville, which was, finally, a unique enough name for an actual Google search.

Because it's all a part of my development as a cartoonist (a process that never ends, I might add), I'm putting the entire run of Inside Joke / Inside Joke University (or at least all the strips I still have digital copies of) here, back on the free website where I spent most of my early cartooning years. The site is even a modified version of the final iteration of my old Keenspace site, because nostalgia is awesome. I apologize for any gaps in the archive (especially near the end), but this is a pretty good representation of my work throughout university, and a little bit after.

Most importantly, I can't honestly say all of this is good. Such is the catch 22 of webcomics — the pool may be a hundred kilometres wide, but it's only a few millimetres deep. It was a wonderful learning experience, especially in the early-ish days before webcomics really took hold, and I hope you had as much fun back then as I did. After all, it's a good thing it was fun then, because these strips sure are embarassing to look back on now.