Are these latest comics slower to get done because of the text-heavy nature

of them, or is it just real life needing tending to? Not complaining about the
pacing, just curious.

The page rate is deceptively slow when you zoom in on a select few days.
There was a 6 day pause, then 13 pages went up. So that's about 2 pages per
day, which is "slow", right? But then you wait a few more days, and 23 pages
have stacked up, and suddenly that rate jumps to 4 pages per day, which is
close to the site average. And if you examine the period between now and 10
days ago, the rate is almost 8 pages per day, which is way above average.
It's better to think of the output in longer term averages. This is harder for
those who demand regularity and predictability, which is something you get
from some comics which update once every weekday, or m/w/f, without fail
as part of their product delivery pledge. In these cases, the regularity of the
output strikes me as being almost as important, and sometimes more
important, than the quality of the content itself. This is because people are
creatures of habit, and have a strong craving for reliability. Many will quite
happily absorb work they consider to be fairly mediocre as long as it is
cranked out like clockwork. The sunday funnies is probably a good long term
example of this. Millions of people gobbled up decades of Marmaduke without
ever laughing once, but editors wouldn't dare fuck with Marmaduke because
people needed that shit with their coffee for some reason. You could put a
gun to their head and they couldn't tell you why. There is comfort in even
bland routine. If you mess with people's comfort and destabilize certain
regularities in their universe, they become agitated, even angry.

Now, if people actually have any sort of passion for the entertainment
comprising their routine, then they become even more agitated if the output
is disturbed. Passionate interest severely exacerbates the situation, and can
make a creator envy someone like Marmaduke Guy who spent his career
crouching safely in mediocrity, grinding out awful dog comics everyone
became totally comfortable with disliking. (I bet he never got an angry letter
from an anime fan.) But if you mess with the schedule of material that people
zealously crave, they are not merely irked, but can receive it as a personal
affront from the author. This is true in varying degrees for probably most
enthusiastic readers, but is more pronounced by the degree to which a
person is mentally ill.

There are some particularly unpleasant entities out there who pose questions
similar to yours, but much less politely. These are seemingly self appointed

watchdogs for my page rate, and I think I'm safe in assuming most are
severely under-medicated teens with a bigtime beef about You Fucking Name
It. As torrid a pace as Homestuck has been unloaded on the public, I think it
must have been pretty easy for some spoiled children to factor that rate of
output into the entitlement complex which presides over their central
nervous systems. Deviation from that production schedule in the minds of the
entitled means nothing other than offense committed by the author, or more
generously, just a staggering display of laziness. Never mind that the alleged
deviation may not even QUITE exist (see numbers in first paragraph). But if it
did, I wonder whose rate of production they would compare it to, aside from
some foggy recollection of my own?

For such people, what would probably be useful would be a dose of

perspective. Not that they're likely to read this, but let's consider the
following data anyway, kindly provided by tvtropes.com.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WebcomicsLongRunners

MSPA is the longest web comic on record, in terms of update quantity. It

accumulated most of this content in about 3 years. Now consider that the
second comic on the list is approximately THE OLDEST WEB COMIC IN
EXISTENCE. It dates back to 1995, which for all intents and purposes was the
year the internet was born.

There are of course some mitigating factors. Most MSPA updates are a single
panel, with some accompanying text. But there are some counter-caveats
which make this a bit more difficult to process. There are several hours of
animated Flash footage mixed in with the updates. There are several more
hours of interactive gameplay. Each Flash instance occupies a single update.
Many updates are accompanied by several pages of dialogue. Some of these
individual conversations would take up 50 pages worth of speech bubbles in a
graphic novel. The total word count for MSPA likely exceeds most of the
comics on that list, or possibly all of them. It wouldn't be surprising.
Homestuck alone is over 300K words. Again, this effort was compressed into
the last 3 years, while most of the other comics date back to the 90's.

What does this mean? Here is what it means.

Let's imagine MSPA was distributed more like a "normal comic". Where, even
with a healthy update schedule of 7 days a week, you still only get one new
thing to click on. One update per day. It could be a simple panel with a silly
gag and no text. Could be a panel with 10 pages of dialogue beneath it. Or it
could be a 3 minute flash animation. All are things that appear in the archive
in good supply. Distributing one such thing per day, as the designated
"product", would be a completely reasonable policy. If that were the
established pattern from the start, nobody would think it was remotely
inappropriate, and nobody would ask for more, in the same way that nobody
ever demands that Penny Arcade update 7 days a week instead of 3.

If that were the case, MSPA would now have 16 years worth of content.

So what does THIS mean??

It means, given that I started 3 years ago, I could take a 13 year break
starting now, and at the end of that break, MSPA's lifetime rate of production
would still manage to make the lifetime rate of most other comics seem
underwhelming. This is literally, actually true, even though it sounds like a
joke. There is statistical evidence to support this, using the only data that
matters, which is the existing work of peers in the same field.

So if some twerp who's never put a stretch of hard work into anything aside
from grinding for levels in WoW all weekend decides to get on my case about
slowing down, I think I'll just start whispering "13 year break..."

13 year break.........

13 year break............................

13

year

break.

P.S. I wonder how many frowns this question would get if you could frown at
things?

P.P.S. smile @ this question if you don't like idea of 13 year break :) :) :) :) :)

July 8 - July 9, 2011

What effect do you expect this stream of images to have on a person reading
through the archive as opposed to waiting?

The longer I do this the more I'm struck by how radical the difference is
between the experiences of reading something archivally vs. serially, both for
the reader, and the author if he's prone to sampling reactions frequently as I
do. For the reader especially, I think the experience of day to day reading is
so dramatically different, they might as well be reading a different story
altogether.

The main difference is the amount of space between events the reader has,
which can be filled with massive amounts of speculation, analysis,
predictions, and something I guess you could call "opinion building", which
can have both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, these
readers become more closely engaged with the material than archival
readers can be, zeroing in on details and insights which might be overlooked
otherwise. On the negative side, I think that excess mental noise the space
between pages allows can potentially be a bit suffocating, and put a strain on
the experience the material was intended to deliver.

The archival reader always has the luxury of moving on to the next page,
regardless of how he reacts to certain events, and thus can be more
impassive about it. That internal cacophony isn't given time to build, and if
there are reservations about a string of events, whether due to shocking
revelations, or questions over the narrative merit of something, or really any
form of dissatisfaction, all he has to do is keep clicking to see how it all fits
together, and can make a more complete judgment with hindsight.

The recent pages had me particularly conscious of the nature of serial

delivery. The whole scene was rolled out over the course of a weekend, first

with Feferi, then Kanaya. When Fereri dies, this registers as one extremely
dramatic event. Cue the waiting, speculating, worrying and all that. When
Kanaya dies a day or so later, it registers as a second dramatic event! Again
the scrutiny begins which the space allows. Is this all too much? How do I feel
about this narrative turn? Is this setting a trend for a bloodbath? Does that
serve any purpose? The reader projects into the future, does a little unwitting
fanfiction writing in his head, and may not like what he sees! All this activity
becomes the basis for opinion building, which is sort of the emergence of an
official position on matters, good or bad, which is only able to flourish in the
slow-motion intake of the story. That official position can be a very stubborn
thing, especially when it's negative, and seriously textures the way additional
developments are regarded. It's really hard to shake a reader off an
entrenched position on a matter, even when it was formed with an
incomplete picture.

Reading the same events in the archive is quite different. Very little of that
inner monologue takes shape. And while the events are still shocking, and the
reader may raise his eyebrows a mile high, he then simply lowers them and
keeps reading. In fact, because of the reading pace, I would suggest these
two deaths actually register as only ONE DRAMATIC EVENT! One guy snaps
and kills two characters. In the flow of straight-through reading especially, it
is quite startling, tension-building, and can only serve to propel the reader
into further pages, at a pace which suspends the experience-compromising
(augmenting??) play-by-play.

But like I've said, I don't think one way of reading is necessarily better than
the other. Both have plusses, and obviously I choose to make this serially,
and I play off plenty of in the moment reactions. But I tend consider the
archival experience more, because when all is said and done, this thing has
to sit on a server for years to come, waiting for new people to find it.