Gunshow

» see gunshowcomic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

KC Green started Gunshow on 4 September 2008, in the window when a cartoonist with a scanner and a domain could still build an audience without a platform in between. It was gag-a-day with no continuity to speak of, drawn loose and fast, usually three or four panels of somebody losing an argument with reality. The first strip in the archive is titled "Question Hound", which matters later.

The output was relentless. By the site's own archive page, 900 strips went up between that first one and the end, 184 of them in 2009 alone and still 103 in the final full year. Alongside the one-offs there were long arcs, including an Anime Club run that followed four fans evicted from their meeting room and kept going for weeks.

The last real comic, "Old Man Gunshow", went up on 30 December 2014. Two days later Green posted strip 900, a single page called "Thanks bye." with a note under it saying that is all there is and that the site will stay up to look through. The reason was mundane. He had a Patreon and other comics running, plus somewhere better to spend the hours.

Here is the strange part from where I sit. The dog reached Turkey intact and the comic never did. Two panels of a six-panel strip arrived in Turkish group chats with no author attached and no sign that anything followed them, which is how most of the world met Gunshow: as a reaction image with the ending cropped off.

~ the record ~

~ the dog ~

Strip 648 went up on 9 January 2013 under the title "On Fire". A dog in a hat sits at a table in a burning room and says "This is fine" over his coffee. Across the next four panels the fire does not go out, and the dog keeps reassuring himself while his face begins to melt. The character already had a name from the 2008 strip: Question Hound. Green has said since that he drew it during a stretch when he was working out his antidepressant dosage, which is in the comic if you read all six panels.

~ what got cut off ~

The internet kept the first two panels and threw the rest away. Those two panels are the whole meme: a calm face with a cup of coffee, and the room already gone. The four that follow are about a dog melting while insisting he is fine, and they turn a joke about denial into something considerably less comfortable, which is exactly why they did not travel.

Green has been chasing the thing ever since. He drew a sequel in 2016, "This Is Not Fine", in which the dog finally gets up and tries to put the fire out, and in a 2023 interview marking the strip's tenth birthday he said plainly that he would like to put the dog to rest. By then the panels had been used by brands on launch day and by politicians about their opponents.

~ the archive still answers ~

gunshowcomic.com has been up and unchanged for eleven years. The front page is still strip 900 with its farewell note, including the typo in "puruse" that nobody has ever gone back to fix, and the footer still carries a blogroll of sixty-odd other webcomics from the same scene. The archive page lists all 900 rows with their dates, from 09/04/08 to the end.

It also settles a date. The databases have Gunshow ending on 30 December 2014, which is the last real comic. The site's own archive opens a 2015 section containing exactly one row: 01/01/15, "Thanks bye.". The goodbye got its own year.

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