Bobbins

Webcomics portal Keenspot kept the Bobbins archive freely accessible online, but the archives eventually moved to Allison's own site. Set in the fictional West Yorkshire town of Tackleford, England and focused on the lives of the staff of the fictional City Limit magazine. The webcomic was nominated for a few awards, and Bobbins discontinuation in 2002 was followed by the start of Scary Go Round, which shares most of Bobbins cast.

• Title — Bobbins • Author — John Allison • Url — bobbins.keenspot.com • Status — Monday to Friday, archived • Publisher — Keenspot • First — 1998 09 21 • Last — 2002 06 03 • Genre — Comedy • Followed By — Scary Go Round

• Illustration — Bobbins characters such as Shelley Winters were also the major characters of Scary Go Round. John Allison had started drawing the characters in 1994 and experimented with them in various paper-comics until mid-1998 when he submitted a sample pack of 25 strips titled Bobbins — northwestern English slang for "crap" - to King Features Syndicate and Universal Features. They later rejected the submissions. By September 1998 John was hand-drawing five strips per week and scanning them for presenting on the web, up until mid-2000 when he changed to computer drawing with Adobe Illustrator. In 2001, Allison started producing Bobbins with vector art, resulting in a more stiff, but visually clean look. Bobbins evolved a lot throughout its run, starting out as following longer storylines and becoming more of a day-to-day strip later on. Allison stopped Bobbins in 2002, so he could focus on his new webcomic, titled Scary Go Round (SGR). Most of the main characters followed him, and SGR, although originally intended to be a spin-off focusing on the minor characters Tessa Davies and Rachel Dukakis-Monteforte, eventually ended up with roughly the same cast as the end of Bobbins, though a number of new characters were introduced later. In 2013, new installments of Bobbins began to appear on Fridays, interleaved with the Bad Machinery strip (which publishes Monday through Thursday). The new episodes were apparently taking place around 1998, "retconned" into the early Bobbins run, and prominently featured Amy, whose older version was important to the Bad Machinery storyline in progress which involved time travel and alternate realities. More new Bobbins comics have been published since, including a run beginning in December in between storylines of Bad Machinery. Some are "Bobbins NOW" strips, featuring the present-day versions of Bobbins characters.