Storming the Tower: The Goats Man Goes Gag-a-Day

Several weeks ago, Jonathan Rosenberg revealed that he was having a problem with Goats. The precise problem is that Goats, a webcomic epic that launched in 1997 and whose plot will climax in 2012, hasn't maintained sufficient reader levels to pay the bills. Consequently, Rosenberg has put Goats on hiatus to concentrate on potentially more lucrative comic projects.

One of the problems with Goats seems to be that long-form epics don't suit an Internet audience hungry for the bite-sized gags from Dinosaur Comics or Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal or Subnormality. Goats isn't Diggable. You can't tweet character development or complex plot arcs. It's better suited to fans of the archive binge than the humor hit-and-run, for people who prefer TV Tropes to reddit's comics page.

With that in mind, Rosenberg has launched a new gag-a-day comic, albeit one with a theme. Scenes From a Multiverse is aimed squarely at the xkcd set, with jokes about Scientology, physics, and data presentation, all told by the colorful (and sometimes tentacled) denizens of the multiverse. Scenes From a Multiverse has gotten a nice initial burst of traffic already thanks to a plug on Questionable Content (it's now cooled down to readable levels), but only time will tell whether Rosenberg finds more monetary success with this new format than he did with Goats.