Statistics September: How Many People Wanted Me To Tell Them The Phantom Wasn’t Dead Last Month

If there is a refrain for 2022, it’s “boy, remember when we thought 2020 was a rough year?”. But the other is that Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s project, to show what it would look like were The Phantom to die, sends people here to check if he’s dead. Four of the five most popular posts around here in September were various What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays) essays. Seeing the list assembled like that reveals that I have not been consistent about whether to capitalize the (Weekdays). Don’t think that isn’t bothering me. (The other piece was me explaining a Far Side that I only got in October 2022, thirty-plus years after first seeing it.)

Still, I like taking this near-the-start-of-the-month chance to look at what was popular that I published recently. The five most popular things I published in September were being upset about comic strips, so I guess thanks, Tom Batiuk? Here’s what people most liked:

I sometimes write things that are not me being angry about comic strips! The ones that people are interested in are me describing what’s happening in the story strips. My plan for the next couple weeks is to publish about these strips which, yes, includes the weekday Phantom run:

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (11 October)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (18 October)
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (25 October)
Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (32 October)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (39 October)

Bar chart of two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After a peak in April 2021 the months hovering around 4500 views per month, without strong direction one way or another, until a new peak emerged in April 2022. A smaller peak reappeared in August and September 2022. — Between The Hypothetical Death of The Phantom and the new-look Gil Thorp and Tom Batiuk being all like **that** it’s good times for me. I just know that we’re heading into something like four weeks of Les Moore sulking about how people don’t remember the Death of Lisa Moore the way Lisa would have wanted them to, though.

Popularity is one thing. Quantifying popularity is another thing, a way of being unhappy for no reason. WordPress has a handy reference of how many of various kinds of interaction happened here in the month. For example, it reports that in September there were 7,217 page views from 3,890 unique visitors. That is, if I haven’t missed something, my third-highest number of page views ever. It’s way above the twelve-month running mean of 5,250.5 views, and also the running median of 4,729.5 views. The number of unique visitors is also well above the running mean of 2,795.0 and the running median of 2,721. If I could just be this annoyed by Funky Winkerbean all the time …

But I am not. And looking at measures of things more like interactions and less like gawking at my rage gets us a more average month. There were 163 things liked in September, not all of them September-published pieces. This is above the running mean, 154.4, and the running median, 154.5, likes. But it’s not that more than average. There were 80 comments given, and that is a big number for me, highest since July 2021. The running mean was 46.7 and median 47.

There were 80 countries or country-like constructs sending me page views in September. 15 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	4,455
Australia	947
United Kingdom	233
India	227
Canada	209
Italy	150
Brazil	86
Philippines	71
Germany	66
Nigeria	55
Spain	54
Portugal	53
Serbia	45
Norway	44
Japan	35
Finland	29
Saudi Arabia	28
South Africa	28
France	27
Sweden	27
Singapore	19
Austria	17
Netherlands	16
Romania	16
Mexico	15
New Zealand	14
Pakistan	14
Russia	14
Denmark	13
Thailand	13
Ireland	12
Hungary	11
Turkey	11
Argentina	10
Belgium	10
Indonesia	10
United Arab Emirates	8
Colombia	7
El Salvador	7
Barbados	6
Greece	6
Israel	6
Malaysia	6
Switzerland	6
Guatemala	5
Kenya	5
South Korea	5
Ukraine	5
Croatia	4
Cyprus	4
Kuwait	4
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Jamaica	3
Latvia	3
Slovakia	3
Taiwan	3
Trinidad & Tobago	3
Albania	2
Costa Rica	2
Czech Republic	2
Egypt	2
European Union	2
Peru	2
Poland	2
Uganda	2
Antigua & Barbuda	1
Armenia	1
Azerbaijan	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Bulgaria	1
Cameroon	1 (**)
China	1
Luxembourg	1
Montenegro	1
Mozambique	1
Puerto Rico	1
Slovenia	1
Somalia	1
Venezuela	1
Vietnam	1

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink. — This month’s baffling anomaly is why I had nearly a thousand views from Australia for some reason? Did I toss in a really good Barassi Line joke I forgot about?

Cameroon has been a single-view country for three months now. No other country can presently make a multi-month claim without fibbing.

WordPress figures that I published 17,279 words in September, which brings me to 155,805 words for the year. Between the release of The Secrete of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue and the start of October I’ve published 3,529 posts that drew 321,250 views from 181,533 unique visitors.

Folks who’d like to be regular readers I suppose know what they’re doing. Still, if you need help, try using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button that’s on the right-hand column of this page. It’s called “Another Blog, Meanwhile” because of a thing that happened to me in 2015 that I’ve explained, like, twice since then. So that’s the sort of person I am and if you still want to follow me, thanks for the patience. It’s kind of you.