Just in time for Super Bowl XLIV, it’s Man’s Game!

I’ve been a huge fan of Liam K. Sullivan (of Kelly, Bob Tulap and Susan Walker fame) so jumped at the chance to be in one of his vids. Check out his awesome, awesome work (here) on YouTube if you haven’t already.

Had a blast shooting this in the Valley early last week. I’m the one with the glasses, cane and JEFbot shirt. Check it out:

Now that we’re well into 2010 (is it really almost the end of January?), I thought I’d take a look back on some of the cool happenings that, in many ways, made 2009 JEFbot’s biggest year since its debut in late 2007.

The first and most important reason is, of course, you readers. Although I love writing and drawing this strip, if its readership hadn’t expanded beyond the handful of friends and family members it started with, I don’t think I would’ve made it this far. You folks, coming back to check out this site week after week, spreading the strip through word-of-mouth, linking it to your own websites, tweeting about it, emailing it around, and making the comment section more alive than webcomics with audiences twice that of JEFbot’s, have  truly made this webcomic as successful as it is. With your help and enthusiasm, JEFbot’s pageviews have gone from thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to literally millions of pageviews in 2007, 2008 and 2009, respectively. So a huge thank you to all of you awesome readers!

And just for fun I thought I’d list the top 10 commenters of 2009, who’ll be familiar to any of you who have read or posted a comment over the past year or so. A big thanks to these 10 and everybody who has ever left a comment on a JEFbot strip or blog post. I’m asked all the time by other webcomic creators how I have such a big, active community of commenters and while I do reply with a couple of theories on the matter, I mostly think it’s due to some sort of magic. Here’s your top 10 commenters of 2009, in order of quantity of posts:

• Spanky McBubbles
• Michael Cornacchia
• JefbotFan#300
• Stan Yan
• DaughterJudy
• funnyshaffer
• Maryz
• reynard61
• Sonitan
• Foxmouse

It was fun to see this list for me. If you guys dig it, let me know and maybe I’ll put out another one mid-2010. Or maybe quarterly?

Looking back on 2009, I’m also proud of the progress of my art and writing. While I still have so much to learn, when I look back at jefbot and the Cornfather’s character designs in 2007 compared to 2009, I can see I’ve come a long way, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time. And while I’m extremely happy with many of the strips in 2007 and 2008, I think pushing myself with longer story arcs in 2009 certainly helped my storytelling abilities. Some of my favorite strips and storylines in 2009 include:

• JEFBOT.111_Bushidō
• JEFBOT.131_Bot Be Buggin’
• The Introduction of Abraxas (JEFBOT.134_Abraxas)
• First appearance (kind of) of cel and The Last Arcade Storyline (JEFBOT.137_Seeing Red)
• The Beach storyline (cel and bot on a date!) (JEFBOT.157_Social Distortion)
• Musashi’s abduction (JEFBOT.190_Epilogue: Good Night, Mu)
• Mini Popbot storyline (JEFBOT.194_Popbot Knows Best)
• The biggest Christmas Bat strip ever! (JEFBOT.201_The Christmas Bat III_part 1 of 2)

I’m sure I’m missing a few but these are my favs off the top of my head for what I feel are the strips that pushed me and the strip forward last year.

One of the things I love about having a webcomic is that it’s truly International; for the most part, anyone can get this strip anywhere in the world. I correspond with many readers in the remotest of places on the globe which sometimes just boggles my mind. Unfortunately, many of those places aren’t represented here, the Top 10 Countries/Territories that read JEFbot:
1.) United States 2.) Canada 3.) UK 4.) Germany 5.) Australia 6.) Netherlands 7.) Sweden 8.) France 9.) Denmark 10.) Poland

While I’m happy to see part of my heritage represented here with Germany, I was extremely disappointed to find that Japan is only #22 on this list! Being half-Japanese, I’m going to have to get that number up in 2010. Translating the comic might help. Any of you readers know Japanese well enough to help me convert these strips to Japanese from English?

Anyway, wrapping this up before I have to split this post in two, thank you, thank you, thank you, to all you readers. If you’re reading this right now that means you’re one of the people that have made this webcomic so much fun for me to do. 2009’s going to be a hard year to beat, but at the rate JEFbot is growing, I think we have an amazing shot!

Here’s this year’s Schuetze Family Christmas Card! I finished it early enough this year to have it printed and shipped to my mom, so she could send it out to friends and family on time. In past years I’ve printed it at Kinko’s, last minute, so of course the cards didn’t turn out as nice. This year I went with Vistaprint.com since they were having a sale at the time. They did a good job except for a rather rough slice at the bottom of some of the cards. Otherwise the color, score and print quality were all great!

Hope all you readers and your friends and families have a Happy Holiday this year, celebrating whatever makes you happy!

Past cards:
• 2007
• 2008

UPDATE!: The Marathon’s over and the guys caught all 493 Pokémon and raised over $18,000 for Ally’s House charity! That’s over $3000 more than their target! Amazing work, guys.

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The guys over at TheSpeedGamers.com are attempting to raise $15,000 for Ally’s House, a charity which helps kids with cancer and their families, by catching every Pokémon in the Nintendo Gameboy and DS games within 72 hours. This is no simple feat, I know, as it literally took me several weeks of playing and trading Pokémon with friends back in the 90s to capture the then-complete Pokédex of 151. Today, there are 493 Pocket Monsters to be caught, spread out over several games. What a cool way to raise money for a good cause while playing an awesome game, right?

As I write this, they’ve been playing for 33 hours, have raised a little over $7000 and caught 227 Pokémon and counting. If you’d like to help TheSpeedGamers make their goal and/or see the live feed of their progress, head on over to TheSpeedGamers.com before the marathon ends. Pika!

Some JEFbot readers may remember a storyline a little over a year ago where the Cornfather and jefbot were shooting a short about a couple of paranormal investigators checking out some strange happenings. Well, it’s taken a while, but the real webseries the storyline was based on, What the F&$@! Was That?!, is now up on YouTube (actually, it went up over a month or so ago, I’ve just been bad about blogging about it) and features an extremely funny, talented cast that includes creator/producer Michael Cornacchia (the real-life Cornfather!) and me. The series is a spoof on those “Haunting” shows where a team of experts (I use the term loosely) go onto “haunted” properties and try and prove the existence of ghosts with psychics, technology and whatnot.

I play Zapatos Zeddmore, a Latino-Asian, tech-savvy geek who’s a bit on the skeptical side as far as what the other team members are up to. A stretch for me, I know. My character is pretty much how I look on weekends. Also keep an eye out for my DS phat and XBOX Live headset, both of which make appearances in a few scenes.

The webseries exists as a series of episodes or as one big short. The video embedded above is from Episode 4. Check out the link below for the entire WTFWT?! short, which I should make clear contains some PG material (sexual situations, bleeped language, implied drug use, etc.), so get your parents’ permission if you’re under 12.

• WTFWT?! The Complete Short

And here’s the link to the beginning of that JEFbot storyline, which you don’t need permission to read:

• JEFBOT.75_The Short

I know, I know: I haven’t blogged in a lOOoOOOng time. Sorry, I’m going to try and do better in the next few weeks and get some new stuff posted. I actually have a couple of half-written blogs sitting in the queue that I just haven’t had time to finish, but, time-permitting, I’ll have those completed and published sometime this week. Again, sorry. Will do better.

You may have noticed that I’ve updated the site over the past couple of weeks with the “TURKEYbot” embedded in the logo to help celebrate the season a bit and a link on the “billboard” to the “Oasis” wallpaper, both on the top banner. PC users should be able to click on the billboard just fine, but Mac users might experience some difficulty. If you’re a user in the latter category, just click here. Happy Thanksgiving, soon!

Another update I’ve made is to the comments. As the readership for JEFbot has grown, so have the comments for each strip, and I’ve noticed it’s been difficult to reference points in previous comments or ask each other questions about a certain point with the linear comment system that’s been up since the beginning. Well, that’s changed now, so if you want to comment on a specific comment, you’re now free to do so. Almost every day I get interesting comments from you readers, positing on what may happen next in the storyline or conjecturing on what a certain character’s motivations are, and I think this is a cool way to engage each other in more of a dialogue, especially since I don’t have a forum on the site. Anyway: have at it if you’re feeling it. I hope to see and join in some lively discussions, soon.

That’s it for now. New blog soon!