November 20th, 2014

Liftoff!

by Rick Kirkman And Jerry Scott

Those of you who follow us on Facebook or have especially acute powers of observation have probably noticed a change in the Baby Blues web site. Years in the making, the new BabyBlues.com is now live. “Years in the making” because 1) Rick couldn’t make up his mind about the new design, and 2) It takes a long time to do when you’re only devoting part-time effort to it. Thanks to the folks at King Features, Tea Fougner, Michael Chan and all the web team coded their little fingers to the bone and finally got the thing done despite our natural tendency to do it “when we had more time.”  They did a fantastic job! And just in time for Baby Blues’ 25th anniversary in print. The first thing you’ll notice is that the strips are much larger and easier to read — at least the dailies. The Sundays are larger than before, but we think we can do even better. Stay tuned. The site is also simplified to make it easier for you to navigate. You don’t have to dive deep into the bowels of the site to find something. Lord knows, those of you dealing with diapers don’t need any more bowel diving. Along the way, we’ve added some cool features. Each character now has a timeline of their comic-life highlights. Including Wren! Now you can see some of the pivotal, and sometimes traumatizing, parts of their lives. You can see what our desks look like with little descriptions of the tools of our trade. Down at the bottom of every page is a little slideshow of Baby Blues history: some special events in the strip, publication of books, special events in our careers. We’ve made it easier for you to order prints of your favorite strips. Click the “buy a print” link under the comic and you’ll be taken to Comics Kingdom’s page where you can order Gallery, Archival matted and/or framed prints. Never mind the sample shows a Beetle Bailey strip in it. We’ll just cover it up with a Baby Blues print of your choice when you order. If you have some very powerful magnets, you can display the prints on your refrigerator. Some things are still here. The archive now goes back to 1995, with the plan to make the entire archive of Baby Blues available before too long. The older strips in the archive are now larger and easier to read. The Baby Blues Book Store is still here to make it easy to locate and purchase Baby Blues collections. And we still have a page where you can get an idea of what is contained in each book. The tagging has been changed. King Features’ crack editors are now in charge of tagging for the purpose of searching the archive. They’re not finished yet, so please be patient. Before too long, you’ll be back to being able to search the entire archive. Of course with all change comes growing pains. We still have a few little glitches here and there. Many thanks to our intrepid trio of fans, who volunteered to beta-test the site so we could squash some of the bugs before you could see them. We’ll try to take care of the remaining ones as quickly as possible. On our wish list is a dedicated mobile layout for the site. Our apologies to anyone using the site on a phone — unless you have one of those giant-screen phones. Hope you like the new site, and please leave your praise, suggestions and constructive critiques in the comments or Contact Form where appropriate.