Today is the three thousandth Unshelved comic strip, a milestone 8.5 years in the making!

Or it’s the 3013th! Or the 3046th! Okay, I’m not exactly sure. But we wanted to celebrate, and by now I’m reasonably certain we’ve published at least 3000, putting us up there with such storied cartoonists as our friends Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett.

This probably shouldn’t be a very hard calculation to make, but it is. I number every strip, but I haven’t been completely consistant. I’ve skipped a few numbers and doubled up on a few too. I counted the number of “originals” (Photoshop files) but I’ve lost a few over the years due to computers being hard. I could count the strips on the site, but most years we run a week or two of repeats. At least three times I have drawn the same strip twice. Should we count those? And then there are guest strips - we’ve probably had at least a months’ worth. What about them? Life is so complex.

As the Wizard of Oz says in Wicked, “There are precious few at ease with moral ambiguities, so we act as though they don’t exist.” And so it is here at Overdue Media, where everything is either black or white. So, sweeping aside confusion and dissent, not to mention facts and figures, we declare today’s to be Probably Unshelved Strip #3000. Let the celebration begin!