"Bear With Me" Logs 200 Episodes
, 20 @ 22:05:11 EST

Αποστολέας Bruin

After just over five years, Bruin's on-line comic strip "Bear With Me" logs its 200th episode.

"Bear With Me" started as a feature of an on-line news website, Midwest Ursine, back in 2002. In 2004, the webmaster for that site changes the site's focus and Bruin decided to post "Bear With Me" on an independant site. With help from INSIDE Bear's host, bearmaster, the current home for the strip was built.

Over the past five years, "Bear With Me" has gone through several changes. It started off in black and white, but converted to color within the first dozen episodes. The most striking change has taken place in the past couple weeks, as Bruin has set aside his colored pencils for digital coloring tools. The story lines have also evolved, from single-episodic gags to long, involved story arcs: The three-day Bear Fair weekend took the better part of a year to tell. Ed's bar was damaged by fire, torn down and rebuilt as part of the Phoenix Center, which also houses the up-scale dance bar, Phoenix Rising, Forrest's cab company, Triangle Taxi, and has space for a variety of LGBT support groups. The end of 2006 saw the shy florist, Paul's, secret yearning for our hero Andy pay big dividends when it was revealed that Andy shared those same feelings.

Bruin readily acknowledges that the stories, not the artwork, drive the success of "Bear With Me", and that it is the characters and their interactions that bring readers back. He hopes to continue to hold the readers' interests with interesting plot turns, while touching on subjects near and dear to their hearts. To answer an oft-asked question, Bruin replies, "Yes, Andy and Paul will very likely end up together...just not as quickly, easily, or in the way you expect. You'll have to keep reading to find out how it plays out."

Find "Bear With Me" at www.bearwithme.us INSIDE Bear supplies a link to the site.