Doctor Fun

» see ibiblio.org/Dave/drfun.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In September 1993 the list of new things on the World Wide Web was a page a person wrote by hand once a month, and Mosaic published it. Doctor Fun is on the September 1993 edition. That is the correct measure of how early this is: not that the web was young, but that a single human being could still sit down and enumerate what had appeared on it since August.

Dave Farley was a computer technician for the library system at the University of Chicago, and starting on 24 September 1993 he scanned a single-panel gag cartoon and put it on a web page. One drawing with one caption under it, usually an animal doing something a person would do. The obvious comparison then and now is The Far Side, and Farley wore it well enough that the comparison stopped being an insult somewhere around year three. Over the whole run there were more than 2,600 of them.

It gets called the first comic on the internet, which is wrong, and Farley never claimed it. Witches and Stitches went out over CompuServe in 1985 and Where the Buffalo Roam was posted daily to its own Usenet newsgroup from 1991; Hans Bjordahl, who drew the second one, has said in writing that the first-web-comic title belongs to Doctor Fun rather than to him. The distinction is narrow and it is real. Those earlier strips were distributed through a service or a newsgroup. Doctor Fun had a page, at an address, that you went to.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the syndicate ~

In 1995 United Media signed him, which at the time meant the company that handled Peanuts and Dilbert had decided a web cartoonist was worth a contract. Doctor Fun ran on United Media's own website for about eight years before the two parted ways around 2003. It is an early and slightly uncomfortable example of the arrangement that every webcomic afterward had to think about: the syndicate wants the audience you built yourself, and what it offers back is a larger audience plus someone else's rules.

The comic survived the breakup and kept going at ibiblio for three more years, which answers the question of who actually needed whom.

~ the promise ~

The last page he left up is four sentences long and it is better than most shutdown posts written by companies with communications departments. "Doctor Fun is over. As promised, I somehow managed to finish 520 weeks or ten full years, even if it took a bit longer than ten years to get there." Then: all of the old cartoons will stay right here as long as ibiblio wants to keep hosting them, and Doctor Fun would never have been possible without the good people of ibiblio.

Five hundred and twenty weeks is ten years of weekly batches. He had committed to the count rather than to the calendar, missed enough weeks over thirteen years for the two to come apart by almost three years, and then finished the count anyway. The page underneath that note still carried links to its mirrors, which by then ran in Australia and in two European countries. It also pointed at two separate caption search engines that readers had built for him on their own time.

~ the second death ~

The cartoons stayed right there for twelve years, exactly as promised. The Internet Archive has ibiblio serving that page normally on 2 September 2018. The next capture, 13 October 2018, is a 403, and so is every capture since, and so is the request I made today. ibiblio itself is fine and answers 200 at its front door; it is the Doctor Fun directory specifically that stopped being readable.

Nobody announced that either, and for a thirteen-year run of one of the web's founding artifacts it is a strange way to go: not deleted, not lost, just permission-denied. The strips survived anyway, because Farley put the whole run on the Internet Archive as a collection, where it reads fine today. The first comic on the web has now sat behind a permissions error at its own address for eight years.

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