So for any of you who didn’t see the post, or those of you who aren’t regular readers of it, Treading Grounds is coming to an end on Friday. Unlike most comics, it will actually HAVE an ending.

Now, me and the creator of TG, Nick, have a lot of similarities: both of us started in 2003 (he with TG and me with Jelly Bean Sniper), both of us took a long time to get our shit together with our webcomics, and both of us use boobs way too often to lure readers in.

And while I am sad to see it end, I am glad that he gets to end the comic the right way. Too many comickers (myself included) end a comic wrong or not at all. My original comic, Middle Man, ended after three strips, then I had George Bush drop a nuke on it (literally) (those comics are long since destroyed).

But Friday’s finale will only be comic #251. It seems like such a low number for a comic eight years in the making, and also low considering how long most comics of lesser quality last.

Some comics just don’t know when to quit. Questionable Content is one of the rare ones that, with a staggering 1963 comics (as of this writing), still manages to stay fresh and entertaining, whereas a comic like MegaTokyo, at 1308 and sporadically updating, should really pack it in, and should have a while ago. No disrespect to Mr. Gallagher; he is my hero and my inspiration, but it seems like he lost interest in it when his son was born, and he’s ruining the comic as opposed to giving it a well-deserved ending (like Josh Lesnick did with Girly).

It makes me wonder, how long will Space go on for? I’m only working on comic #189 at the moment, and I’m sure I will probably surpass the 251 TG is gonna be at, but by how much? I set up everything so that if it ran into the thousands it wouldn’t throw off my coding, but really, is it necessary for it to go that far? I’m only on chapter two, but how many chapters do I need? Twenty? Ten? Four? I don’t know, and it’s the disadvantage of writing one script at a time instead of outlining the whole thing in the beginning. That’s why comics by Sarah Ellerton (Phoenix Requiem, Inverloch) never have that problem, but I haven’t done that. I have a notebook with random ideas that I come up with, and I could use them next week, three years from now, or in another comic. I can’t tell you if Sam and Jack get together because I don’t know either. I don’t know if C.J. will ever come back from Miami, if Jim will ever know how to run a business, anything like that.

I can’t tell you a lot about where my comic is going, or how many comics it will last, but I can say that I don’t want it to be a joke.

I would much rather be Treading Grounds than treading water.