FRIEND BEAR!

This is a mirror of the Friend Bear comic strip. The official site is http://www.friendbear.com/, and all credit goes to that site on the origin of these strips. I'm merely mirroring them--I am not nor have I ever been an official part of the Friend Bear dynasty, though this mirror did get the host of the Friend Bear site's blessing.

--buntz ( buntz33@hotmail.com )

I'm stopping the Friend Bear mirror here at 296 strips. (It goes to 297 because the elusive 279th strip does not exist! #279 is the stuff of myth!) In the general area of strip #300, the host of the Friend Bear site, Steve Steffler, made a post to the Friend Bear message board asking for strip submissions. Though the general style stayed the same, points changed and the style of humor differed. (A low point in my mind is the Friend Bear ALL YOUR BASE strip.)

So my subjective mind is calling #297 the end of the Friend Bear dynasty. The rest of the strips may have their points, I'm not deeming them unreadable, but they are certainly not in keeping with the tradition of Friend Bear, whatever that may be. This is all very trivial and goofy and likely not to be read by anyone except random googlers--so be it.

Below are the two posts made by Steve in July 2003, and why I am ending the mirror here.

--buntz

Post #1:

Hi,

So, just so you know, I'm the guy who hosts Friend Bear - and over the years we've ran the website I've been known to draw the odd comic as well. Anyway, these days things have been very stale at Friendbear.com, and we need to find someone who can regularly create fo-rest magic by drawing strips for the site.

If you think you can re-create the Friend Bear style and bring Friend Bear to new heights of humour without tarnishing his shiny polished image of innocent adventure-going, and also you're capable of using MS Paint and have the Courier font installed on your system, maybe this is a job for you.

Email your take on Friend Bear strips to me, Steve, at generica@antisocial.com. I am looking for someone who is capable of taking over regular strip-making duties. Could this be you? I sure the heck hope so!

Post #2:

So I was writing an email to someone with a friend bear history in it, and i thought i would post it in here.

here it is:

1) friendbear was originally created by Stephen Swift from the town of Holland, MA in the USA... aka swifty... http://dustgun.waferbaby.com/ is his current project.

2) he showed me friendbear right when he started drawing the first few strips, and i flipped and i totally fell in love. we decided that we could both start drawing strips and maybe make a normal web page for them. by the way, i'm Steve Steffler, and I live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

3) i set up a website with a domain name and a few things like guestbook/webboard etc... basically everything exactly the way it still is. both swifty and i started drawing strips all the time, primarily his ended up online. and the site got popular through word-of-mouth, as tends to happen.

4) swifty sort of disappeared and did things like go to college, meet girls, start other projects, so for a long time i was the only person drawing strips... so that's what i did, but i work very long hours and have for a long time (since entering the "real world"). so i rarely got around to putting up new strips.

5) two guys from scotland, Liam Harper and Lewis Hyatt got in touch with me and offered to make friendbear strips. in fact they had created a bunch of them already for everyone's enjoyment. i was very impressed because they are able to very faithfully exhibit the style of friendbear swifty and i came up with, and so for a long time they took turns drawing strips and i set up a way for them to easily go onto the site and upload strips via a web interface which updates all the pages, like the archive and the main frames, etc using PHP and perl.

6) they stopped drawing last year for a long time, and it got very sporadic, because, as usual, the real world interrupted their drawing time. there have also been many months of downtime here and there for various reasons - usually it's tough to find good hosting, so i have always hosted the site myself, but sometimes i didn't have access to servers / etc. i just recently moved and for two months the site was down then.. but i got it back up last week, as you now know.

7) after i posted that call for submissions, one of the two scottish guys (Liam) that draw got back to me this week, excited to draw again. so he has put a few up. and i hope as time passes he can put more up.

so in essence, i act more as the site's curator and caretaker than anything else - i don't draw new strips anymore and although i love friendbear, i have limited time to put into it. you're very welcome to help out... if you have strips you'd like to upload, please email them to me and i will put them up post-haste!