The Daily Grind’s Iron Man Challenge, an online competition for web cartoonists meant to foster a more strict adherence to stated update schedules for web comics, has lost another contestant. Only four days after the first cartoonist bowed out Richard Guidry became the second. Rather than miss an update and get tossed out of the competition Richard voluntarily left citing personal life issues that were getting in the way of his daily updates. He explains this further in a forum post.

Is this the beginning of the Iron Man Challenge purge that I predicted in our last show? I commented that now that we have the first person to lose the competition and the stigma of being the first loser has past we could see a lot of people bailing out realizing fully what they got themselves into. The really dedicated will come out of the other end of the purge and the real competition will be on. Will this play out that way? We shall see.