In the early 1990s, cartoonists produced comics through various
Internet protocols. During this period, it was unclear which systems would turn out to be the most successful. Hans Bjordahl, student at the
University of Colorado at the time, started posting
Where the Buffalo Roam on April 15, 1992 on
Usenet, in
GIF and
PostScript format. Sharing the comic through the Internet, its readership extended through a few states. Even in 1995, cartoonist Dominic White published his comics
The Internet Explorer Kit for the Macintosh and
Slugs through
Gopher rather than the World Wide Web, despite the latter rapidly gaining popularity. The first strip of Stafford Huyler's
NetBoy was uploaded on the World Wide Web in July 1993. Being described as an early example of
nerd humor, the
stick figure comic made frequent references to technical topics most people with an Internet connection at the time would have knowledge of. Huyler later started the spin-off comic
U.Nox, about
system administrator Uri Noxen. Despite the small size of Huyler's early
NetBoy comics (10
kilobytes), the server it was hosted on would crash when the strip got over six visits per second. In response to the webcomic's increasing popularity, Huyler built a stronger server himself. Despite these limitations, Huyler was one of the pioneers of the concept of
infinite canvas, uploading strips in shapes and sizes other than those used in standard printed comics. In November 1994, Reinder Dijkhuis started publishing the
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on the World Wide Web in
Dutch, previously a small-press comic entitled
De Rovers van Clwyd-Rhan. The two of these were the first known webcomic created outside of the United States. The same year, an artist going by the name Eerie created a webcomic on
bulletin board systems using
ANSI art, titled
Inspector Dangerfuck. Webcomics popular on the internet in January 1995 included
NetBoy,
Aaron A. Aardvark, and
The Afterlife of Bob. At this point, fans of traditional comics such as
Calvin and Hobbes started sharing such
copyrighted comic strips on the internet. By
the end of 1995, there existed hundreds of webcomics, most of which were derived from
college newspaper comics, and most were short-lived. Newspaper comic strip syndicates also launched websites in the mid-1990s. Other webcomic collectives, like Big Panda, started in the second half of the 1990s. Big Panda hosted over 770 webcomics, including
Sluggy Freelance and
User Friendly, which started in 1997. Big Panda's discontinuation resulted in the formation of
Keenspot in 2000. In 1995,
Dilbert became the first
syndicated comic strip to be officially published through the Internet. Though the genre was popularized by
PvP, the first
video game webcomic was Chris Morisson's
Polymer City Chronicles, which started being published on the World Wide Web in 1995. Three years later, in 1998, Jay Resop started the first
sprite comic,
Neglected Mario Characters. ==Timeline==