Some people run marathons. Fumiya Yomigishi draws two panels every single day, and has done since 12th September 2006. His Japanese webcomic Baneusagi to Kamepan, a vertical two-panel strip posted to his blog while he holds down a regular office job in Osaka, reached its 7,350th consecutive day on Monday 26th October. According to a report by Katsuo Miyagi for File 770, that takes it past the completed 7,348-day run of Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary, which updated daily from June 2000 to July 2020 and, famously, never missed one.
File 770 is careful to point out that this is not a world record. Kevin & Kell has been published daily since July 2000 and Sinfest has an unbroken run going back to 2006, and there may well be others out there quietly clocking up the days. But nobody has checked their homework quite like this. A review of the posting dates found no missing day between 12th September 2006 and 20th October 2026, and 803 of the early strips were matched against their original Yahoo! Blogs timestamps in the Internet Archive. That is the kind of rigour usually reserved for carbon dating.
The strip has its own modest fandom, too. Its third character popularity poll, announced on 17th October, was won by a character called Mubo with 10 votes, ahead of Chuck on nine and Marin on eight, from 32 valid votes in all. A set of 16 LINE stickers went on sale in September. It is not, in other words, a corporate juggernaut. It is one man, a blog and an unbroken habit that has outlasted the Yahoo! Blogs service it started on and very nearly the entire smartphone era.
Daily webcomics are the endurance sport of the cartooning world, and the ones that last tend to be built by stubborn people with day jobs. Tayler, whose space-mercenary epic picked up several Hugo nominations along the way, at least got to finish his story on his own terms. Yomigishi shows no sign of stopping. Tomorrow, 29th October, will be day 7,353, and somewhere in Osaka, a man will come home from work and draw it.
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