Weekly Update - 200 - 1/8/24 (Patreon)

Happy 200th Weekly Update everyone! I wanted to do something special for it, but... I got dragged to a furcon this weekend and didn't end up doing much of anything. I thought we'd all agreed no more travelling for the medium term, but I guess I was alone in thinking that.

It was fun though. PDFC is always a fun little con, hosted by good people with a great staff. I think I'm also finally getting past the worst of these terrible holiday illnesses I keep being afflicted with. Hopefully I didn't catch anything NEW from this weekend.

Comic this week? Unfortunately no. Apart from being gone all weekend, it's pretty normal for me to take a week off after I conclude a chapter, so I'm taking that liberty again. But next week we'll come back with Chapter 11. (And I hope, for the love of every god, that we are DONE travelling for a bit!)

On Wednesday I will share with you a bunch of sketches I did though, from both PDFC and from Christmas. Mostly heads and faces, trying to improve the consistency of my faces.

Drawing: Page 183

Playing: Not much lately! A little bit of WoW? Some Space Engineers? Or just more drawing maybe.

Ramble:

Some interesting news from this month, I guess...? Someone, or perhaps many people, seem to be boosting us on Top Web Comics, so we're currently ranked #10 on the list of Top 100.

And I... I dunno! I still don't know how to feel about that. It feels weird to me. On the one hand, it's great having that sort of visibility. It's basically free advertising. Traffic to the site has almost doubled this month as a result, and our retention of readers has historically been pretty good. However, much more prominent and established webcomics that have existed for 20 years and have tens of thousands of fans are currently ranked below us. I don't think we have nearly that many fans. So in a big way I guess it doesn't feel earned to have a ranking so high? At the same time, does our position on TWC make a huge amount of difference to anyone but me?

I dunno! I'm not gonna worry too much about it I don't think. Even double traffic from TWC is still half of what we were getting when we were running an ad on FA, so I doubt too many people are gonna see our new ranking and decide to just be mad about it because we've supplanted THEIR favorite comic.

Or maybe they will! Who knows. Let's cross that bridge if we come to it.