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No. 501: iToons by the Numbers

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iToons by the Numbers

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=501

Strip by: KelpTheGreat

{An infographic}
Header: iToons by the Numbers: The First 500 Strips
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Infobox: 54 Authors | 500 Strips | 184 graphic media properties referenced
Text: Authors who only had a single strip published: 37%
Text: Authors whose submissions are in the double digits: 20%
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Text: Top 5 Most Prolific Authors
{A horizontal bar graph showing KelpTheGreat with 82, Nyperold with 52, Reisen U. Inaba with 48, Averagemoe with 39, and Sloublues with 38}
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Text: Strips that reference Peanuts: 18%
Text: Strip source breakdown:
{A pie chart showing webcomics with 37.5%, books with 7.6%, manga with 4.4%, and newspapers with 50.5%}
{Another pie chart shows that 42.4% of the 184 referenced properties have only been referenced once, and that 57.6% have been referenced twice or more}
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Text: Top 5 sources besides Peanuts
{A vertical bar graph showing xkcd with 19, Calvin and Hobbes with 24, SRoMG with 27, Nancy with 31, and Pearls Before Swine with 43}
Text: Most commonly referenced non-comic strip media: My Little Pony
Text: Number of animated GIFs: 5
Text: Number of self-references to iToons: 19
Text: Infographic created with www.canva.com

The author writes:

A few months after coming up with the idea for, and starting work on iToons #500, I came up with another: do an infographic that covered the first 500 strips. So here we are.

To put this together, I went through the entire archives, marking down the following information:

  1. Who the strip was by
  2. How many strips had been submitted by that author
  3. What original source(s) did the strip use
  4. Whether the strip was inspired by or referencing another strip that it wasn't necessarily sourcing material from
  5. The source of the original strip, loosely grouped into categories of newspapers, webcomics, books, or manga
  6. Whether the strip referenced some media that wasn't a comic strip, and how many times
  7. How many times each comic strip (series, not individual daily strips) was sourced or referenced

I tried to very carefully keep track of everything, but I'm not perfect, and I may have missed something.

One conundrum arose when an iToons strip referenced a strip which itself referenced another strip. What should I mark down? Eventually, I decided it made the most sense to count only the closest source - so if an iToons strip referenced a SRoMG strip, it only incremented the SRoMG references, not also the Garfield references. On the other hand, if a strip referenced a Garfield strip which happened to be one that was frequently used in SRoMG, but the author didn't connect it to SRoMG in any way, then only Garfield got an incrementation.

References and source strips were also counted together. If one iToons strip used Garfield assets, and another iToons strip didn't use any assets but the author said it was modeled after or inspired by a Garfield strip, then those two strips each incremented Garfield references by one.

And finally... I did not include #200 or #408 in the data. Those are both great strips, but it would have doubled my workload just to include them. So this is technically only looking at 498 strips, except that I still used 500 in the calculation of some percentages. Sorry.

Infographic was created with Free Online Infographic Maker by Canva. Here's the spreadsheet I made to keep track of everything. There's additional info that didn't make it into this infographic.