I was having a fun little timewaster of adding a history of sorts to the sidebar of joshlesnick.com.  But it ended up way too long, so I'll just submit it as a post and link to it.  I sure like to talk about myself, because I LOVE MYSELF.

SOME FACTS ABOUT JOSH LESNICK

-He jumped into a box of coathangers at age 5 just to see what it would be like.
-He spent most of grades 4-6 in an "adaptive behavior" class.
-Began drawing at Age 7 (ca. 1985)
-His first comic was named "Racecars".  It was about talking cars.
-Spent most of his childhood drawing newspaper-format comics (which mostly drew influences from Garfield and Bloom County) that he would show to his parents every single day.  They were wonderful parents to put up with such a thing.
-While living in Oklahoma in 1986, he created a comic called "Lionus", which went on for about seven years, evolving a little each year and later becoming known as "The Lesnick Zone" and finally "Cashews".  It ended up converting to the form of self-published ashcan comics (with very minimal distribution, if any.) containing the random humor many of his future comics would spawn from.
-Discovered Japanimation in 1992, and like many young impressionable artists (and some old impressionable ones too), he spent many years developing his art style into a terrible facsimile or generic anime. Fortunately, he outgrew it. He encourages many other artists to do the same.

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PUBLISHCOMICBOOKOGRAPHY

-Early Haberdashery-

Video Apocalypse (1993-1994) was essentially my first published work. This was a self-produced videogame fanzine with a low circulation, still notable for being part of a very early generation of the videogame fandom based around publishing and sharing information. Many editors in this generation went on to become professional game journalists. Video Apocalypse also contained the comic Asylum my first comic work to have an audience, however small it was.

Asylum (1993-1995 and again in 1997). A comic about two guys and a girl. They all made jokes, and the guys were dumb, and the girl was very violent and hot. I swear to god I was not aware, at the time, that eight-thousand other comics followed this formula. Up until I created Asylum, I had aspirations to create family-friendly cartoons and newspaper comics. I'm not sure why, but things changed, and this was the result. This comic was featured in Video Apocalypse, and after VA ended, I made one ashcan comic with a couple new stories, but I didn't distribute it much. In 1997, I threw the comics on the web and drew a new web-exclusive story, and a lot of people got to see the series for the first time.

Ryuken (1994-1996). I took the female character from Asylum and attempted to make a serious story about her. Similar to Video Apocalypse, this was a self-produced zine with a small distribution to people in the comic and anime fandoms. It wasn't very notable and made no impact; Factsheet Five wouldn't even list it, which was a bit embarrassing. It was merely a stepping stone in publishing and forging relationships, and that's why I'm including it.

L4 (1997). This zine was published by Brian Sutton at Happy Jackal Graphics after an attempt at actual publication through Antarctic Press, encouraged all the way by Shon Howell, the first industry guy I kibbitzed with. Notable for being my first work published by someone else, as well as my first adult work. It did poorly, but if anyone bought and still actually has it, I daresay they have a collector's item.


-The Published Author-

A-Bomb #14 (1997) included my 10-page "Ewey Rotten Sukiyaki" porn anime parody story. This was my first truly published work, by Antarctic Press, with Shon as the editor. A-Bomb would later be dropped after Antarctic's first massive retooling, which led to the creation of Radio Comix, whom will come up a lot.

Gingerbread Cinnamon (1998) was a limited ashcan series, sold at a very high price to very gracious and patient fans of mine. This comic was intended to be published as a miniseries through Kris Overstreet's then-new White Lightning Publications. It subsequently became my first (and only!) comic to be rejected by Diamond. Kris wanted to include it in his Bootleg anthology, but I opted to self-produce it instead. around 25 of an intended 50 were sold, and it remains one of my rarest books.

Bootleg #1-3 (1998-1999) I believe Bootleg was White Lightning's most successful print title, and I contributed to the first three issues with stories based around my "Wendy" character. The one in issue 3 was written by Overstreet; it's the only comic ever published with my art and a different writer.

The Daily Texan (various issues) (1998-1999). UT's increasingly politically-correct newspaper printed my "Bonds" comics in 1998 and "Ultimate Answer" comics in 1998 and 1999. They were both terrible.


-Radio era-

Mangaphile (various issues) (1999-2000). My relationship with Radio Comix sort of began way back when I was around 16. Shon was just about to accept an awful comic for Furrlough, when the furry comic editor job was passed over to Elin Winkler, who was smart enough not to let that happen. She had to endure a few more lousy submissions from me while she was working for AP, then eventually I met the whole team during my short time living in San Antonio, when Elin ran an anime club. My first job for her was to run the club's website, and I was able to handle that for about 6 or 7 months. Then I had some terrible artwork featured in one of Radio Comix's first publications, a zine called... I forget the name, but it had art from various club members in it. Anyway, I was there when AP exploded and Elin announced to the club that Radio Comix was going to happen.

It wasn't for a little while until I'd be submitting comics to them, since at this time I wasn't drawing furry comics anymore. But when they announced the new Mangaphile anthology, I was all over that, and submitted my "Wendy" comic to it. When it took them a little while to reply, it was among the things I whined about in an angsty comic posted to my website. Elin accepted the comic anyway, and it was generous of her to do so!
Wendy was featured in the premiere issue and various other issues, and was the only comic I submitted to Mangaphile. I stopped after deciding to focus on Wendy as a webcomic.

Milk! #18, 19, 21, 22, and 26 (2000-2001). "Polyp the Hunter" was the last comic I ever drew primarily for print. This adult action story was drawn initially for the Milk anthology, and later offered on my adult paysite Slipshine. It became the most favorite comic among Milk readers for quite some time, as well as the first Milk story to get a Trade Paperback collection.

Milk! (various issues) (2001-2005). "Orgymania" and "The Pet Elf" were also featured in Milk, although these comics were originally drawn for Slipshine. It works out, since I doubt either comic will be getting a trade collection, so if anyone wanted them in print, Milk is the way to go.


-The Age of Trades-

Cutewendy: Collection of Perfection (2002) was my first trade, published by Keenspot Entertainment, and collecting all 196 episodes of my webcomic Cutewendy. This book proved to be a moderate success, but the joy was severely hampered by the dubious binding quality Brenner was guilty of at the time.

Polyp the Hunter: The X Phase (2003) was my first adult book, and probably not the last. This collected the Polyp comics published in Milk!, as well as a web-exclusive story featured on Slipshine. This book did all right.

Girly Volume 1: The Sidekick (2006) is an insanely-delayed book co-produced by Studio Zoe (my company) and Radio, featuring the first set of comics in my first significantly popular series Girly.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness (2006) I was one of the guest artists of Scott Pilgrim 3, contributing a goofy little two-page story in the back. It was very fun indeed!

Cutewendy (2007). This is a new edition of the Cutewendy collection originally published by Keenspot. It is being made primarily because I want a version of this book to be available for a while, and a high-quality version, unlike before. I'm not expecting to make money of it anytime soon!

Girly Volume 2: The Sister (2007). I am confident that this book will make it and that I will be able to do a third volume, which will be around 300 pages. This, along with the second Cutewendy book, will be the first publications to be produced entirely by my own indie company Studio Zoe.

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PUBLISHWEBOGRAPHY

Bonds (1998). Published at the Fan Art Headquarters website. Originally, I just made my UT comics available on the web, but after some time, I started adding some web-exclusive episodes. And thus, this could be considered my first comic created primarily for the web... My first "web comic", if you will! A second version of this comic was also published on the Animeco website.

Impromanga (1998-2000). Created by Yves Belanger and Jean-Francois Gervais. Originally featured at the Fan Art Headquarters, then it emancipated and kind of evolved into the site now known as Centerstorm. It was a fun, moderately-popular little site where artists all over the world take turns adding to comics in (as the name suggests) an improvised fashion. An extremely notable site which not many people may know about. Artist which went on to become famous contributed to it.
Comics I primarily contributed to included:
Controversial Jack: The most random of the Impromangas, and pretty much everybody contributed at least one page to it. In my section, Jack falls experiences unrequited love with a girl who runs off with a fuse box.
Queen of Clubs: Girly comic created by Zahara Medina, an artist who has since vanished from the internet. Possibly the most successful Impromanga as it told a fairly cohesive story and actually ended. It also displayed some early developments of Mal of Scott Pilgrim and Clay of Sexy Losers. David McGuire, the famous artist of "YOU RAPED PATTI" also did some pages. Also, Eisu of No Pink Ponies turned it into a lesbian love story... I'm not kidding! My section involved the comic's secondary couple and I squealed with girly glee as I wrote their adorable little romance. Then Zahara made them break up. =( Andrea L. Peterson (No Rest for the Wicked) and Tang Ho (Weekly Comic) also contributed.
Pennywise: Mal created this comic, and I wrote most of the story for it. I don't really want to say much about it. It's just.. uh...
The Party: A vanity-fest where artists inserted themselves into a fictional party. I believe I drew the part that followed the most epic Impromanga chapter ever by Mal and Nied (of That Weekly). It was tough, but hey, you know. This comic also included really early material from Corey Sutherland Lewis the Rey and ohhh it is so adorable. =)


Wendy (1999-2003, and again in 2005). Wendy was, for all intents and purposes, an attempt to take a character created for sexy cheesecake porn and base a straight humor series around her. It's my first creation that got "popular" enough to spark bandwidth concerns. The site was getting almost a eight hundred visitors a day and was in danger of generating (gasp) ten gigs of bandwidth a month! I mean, my word! So it moved to Keenpot where it stayed until it died, twice. It started as an experimental humor comic, then it tried to be sort of serious, and ohhhh... stuff. I'm kind of tired of talking about this comic. At its peak it has about 6000 readers. It's dead now, but I still draw cheesecake porn of Wendy every once in a while.

Cutewendy (2000-2002). Originally created as a spinoff of Wendy using a recycled character design, but otherwise intended from the start to be nothing like its parent comic. The free-spirited nature of the series took me by surprise, and it ended up being the first thing I created for the internet that wasn't awful. I gave it a print collection, something that will never happen with Wendy.

Polyp the Hunter (2001-2002). Slipshine's first comic. After completing my story for Milk!, I went on to do a short web-exclusive story which was a mix of porn and action. It was fun, but it made me want to do a straight-action story with Polyp, so I set the character aside to try it later. I'm still planning to try it.

Class Exhibitionist (2001-2005). Known originally as "Sekilala", this was my most ambitious and complete story ever made for Slipshine. Originally it was based on anime porn parody, but after I got tired of anime, I was able to concentrate on the sexier parts, based on exhibitionism and group sex. By the way, everyone, I have an exhibitionism and group sex fetish.

Story of the Pet Elf (2002-2005). The third in my trifecta of Slipshine smut is this charming story that mixed D&D-type fantasy with sex-slave fantasy. This is the porn story I will go back to if my career in comics fails.

Girly (2003-present). Finally, Girly. You know what Girly is! It's Girly!

The Puppy Club (2006-present). This is an ongoing attempt at starting a new webcomic. But starting new webcomics is hard, it turns out.

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HODGEPODGERRY

-First comic submitted to publishers was a furry comic called "Two Guys Who Have No Life", submitted for consideration for the "Furrlough" anthology, which Antarctic Press was publishing at the time.
-First work accepted for publication was a story called "Ewey Rotten Sukiyaki", printed in A-Bomb #14 by Antarctic Press (1997).
-Spent his first year of college in 1997 at UTSA, and attended the San Antonio Animation Society clubs wherein he met Elin Winkler just as she was forming Radio Comix, the comic company he now semi-regularly freelances for. Left for UT in '98 due to UTSA being a preppy asshole fuckup college.
-along with Radio and Antarctic, Josh has had work published in print by White Lightning Publications, Limelight Publishing, and Keenspot

-First online venture was a Renegade-powered BBs in Houston called "The Dokuritsu Fun BBs". (1995)
-First time on the internet was through Compuserve.  First newbie message board post was on Antarctic Press's Guestbook.
-First web page was the "Dokuritsu Fun Web Page" which went live March 25, 1996
-First screen name was "Really Large Brick", used on a Houston BBs.  Other oft-used names included "Kunislayer Shujo" (also his alias for when he drew porn), "Hamburger", "Geobreeder", and "Manman" (or "Man^2").
-Finally settled on the nick "SuperHappy" which he originally created only for the [adult swim] message boards.  After quickly giving up on those forums, he started using it on 4chan, and then eventually LJ, SA, IRC,  and everywhere.
-"SuperHappy" is a reference to "King of the Hill"  episode 6ABE21 where the Hills visit Japan.  "Everybody Super Happy" is the sound a Japanese girl's watch makes in that episode.
-After hosting his sites mainly with whatever ISP he was on for a few years, he signed up with Dreamhost on November 1998, wherein he registered wendy-project.com, his first domain (now in the hands of squatters)

-"Wendy" was his first comic created for the web, and it debuted February 7, 1999
-Most of the characters for "Wendy" were actually created in 1996 as part of some anime parody comic.
-Joined the Keenspot network on August 2000, and created "Cutewendy" shortly after.
-As of early 2002 all of Josh's comics became digital... that is, written and laid out in pencil, and then inked entirely on the computer with a tablet.
-"Cutewendy" ended properly May 2002 and was collected into Josh's first published trade a few months later.
-"Wendy" ended not-so-properly for various crazy reasons April 2003. Then it ended again somewhat properly on September '05.
-Josh made plans off-and-on to move "Wendy" to print, which never panned out.
-"Wendy" had a planned ending which was quite bad.  A summary is now available for all to see in the Wendy Archives

-Graduated college Spring 2001, majoring in English.
-First job out of college was temp work packaging CDs which contained software manuals.
-Created Slipshine on December 2001 after realizing pretty quickly that the job market was very not good.
-Slipshine's original artists were "Kunislayer Shujo" and Moe Jave (Robert DeJesus).
-After advertising for Slipshine on RPG World, the bandwidth for the site went up enough that Josh had to switch from shared hosting on Dreamhost to his own server.  And wendy.dreamhost.com was born.
-Slipshine was Josh's main source of income from 2002 to 2005. However, as of January 2006 he no longer contributes regularly to the site and will be living from his other comics.
-created "Girly" on April 6, 2003 and was originally not planning on it lasting for more than 50 strips.
-unlike all of Josh's other online comics, the main focus of "Girly" is good characters.  Everything else is secondary, including humor.
-Original title planned for "Girly" was "Who's That Girl?", but among other reasons, Josh decided he'd rather name the comic after a Refreshments song and not a Madonna song.
-left Keenspot on November 2004 and moved "Girly" over to wendy.dreamhost.com
-With the possible exception of the "Cashews" series, "Girly" is easily the longest work Josh has ever produced, with over 450 strips produced as of November 2006. "Wendy" had 397 pages produced, and "Class Exhibitionist" had 291. Girly blows away his other work in sheer number of panels.
-Girly hit Strip #300 in October 2005. 300 was the amount of comics Josh originally planned to do of Wendy before ending the series.
-If you take all the time Wendy was online, and subtract all the months when the comic was declared "over", Wendy lasted about three years and eight months. By January 2007, Girly will have been running for three years and eight months, finally passing Wendy as Josh's longest-running published comic.
-the average time it takes to complete a Girly strip is about 8 hours.

THE CHARACTERS
Roy & Royde (1985): the cars from "Racecars".  They talked!
Lionus (1986): A lion-man (I guess you could say he was a "furry") who was the main character of the comics I drew in grade school.
Josh Means (1987): Sort of a Mary Sue character who was the main character in most of my comics drawn during adolescence.  He eventually split off into his own personality.
Miki (aka Ryuken) (1992): The first character I drew in a Wappy ^_^ style.  She starred in a few comics, including an attempt at her own series called "Ryuken", which was supposed to be dramatic but ended up unintentionally silly.  I still draw her every so often, in a more cartoony style.
Zoe (1993): the female lizard furry who, for whatever reason, was given the role in my autobiographical comics as my familiar/muse/sidekick/conscience/whatever.  My DBA is named after her.
Wendy (1996): The female character design I grew to love and lust after enough to give her a website and a few comics.
Lucy (1996): The gothy girl whose design has also shown up in a few comics, and currently the only old character of mine to show up as a supporting cast member in Girly (note: not the same Lucy from the Wendy comics)
Cutewendy (2000): Shorter and more foul-mouthed version of Wendy.  Similar design, but really a completely different character.  She also got to be in the better comic.  She is a source of much confusion.
Winter and Otra (2003): the first female characters I ever created that I can't bring myself to draw porn of, even in private.  They're my girls. =|