Bobbins (webcomic)

Bobbins
First two panels of Bobbins, featuring Richard and Shelley
Author(s)	John Allison
Website	bobbins.keenspot.com
Current status / schedule	Monday to Friday, archived
Launch date	21 September 1998
End date	3 June 2002
Publisher(s)	Keenspot
Genre(s)	Comedy
Followed by	Scary Go Round

Bobbins is a webcomic written by John Allison. It ran from 21 September 1998 to 3 June 2002, but shifted into reruns with commentary on 17 May 2002. It has made occasional returns in John Allison's website in between his other comics since 2013. Webcomics portal Keenspot kept the Bobbins archive freely accessible online, but the archives eventually moved to Allison's own site.

Bobbins is 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 won a few awards, and Bobbins discontinuation in 2002 was followed by the start of Scary Go Round, which shares most of Bobbins' cast.

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 1999, Bobbins and Goats produced two crossovers starting April Fool's Day. In 2001, Allison started producing Bobbins with vector art, resulting in a more stiff, but visually clean look.

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.