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5/17/07

A little over a year ago, I stopped feeling obliged to switch between time zones/story arcs less often than three to seven days. About the same time I built a set of formulas in the AKOTAS gags spreadsheet which tracks how many gags have been set in each story arc. The three major arcs all had totals of about 185 plus-or-minus 35. I noted in a newspost once before that I find it easier to write contemporary arc gags than space arc, but I was still disappointed to discover that the biggest gap between the major three arcs was that the contemporary arc was about eighty strips ahead of the fairy tale arc - which is to say the baseline arc, the one that's meant to provide you the readership with the baseline to know which bits in the other arcs I'm inventing, and the contemporary arc (of the other two major arcs, anyway) has the most of those bits. The space arc, the other of the three major arcs (and the one, being the most similar to my previous Arthurian project on the fanfiction site, which I'd've expected to be the frontrunner), was ahead of the fairy tale arc but not by nearly as much. So I resolved to work on bringing the totals closer. Around last November the difference was down to less than twenty and, while I wasn't watching, the fairy tale arc had pulled ahead of the space arc. Running the Roman campaign was a great help to pulling the fairy tale arc ahead. But then last December there was the long-awaited week-plus-long plotline when contemporary Arthur came into his inheritance, and the gap went back up to the high twenties. Shortly after that Lancelot went questing in the fairy tale and space arcs, which was a boon to those arcs, but sidelined development in the contemporary arc of the characters' new physical proximity and a few other innovations. As of today's, according to the spreadsheet, all three major arcs have equal counts for the run of the comic to date, at 345, which the baseline arc actually reached first. This won't last, obviously (unless every gag from now on were to zap between all three); and there'll be plotlines that skew it temporarily like the inheritance did. But the difference shall never be eighty again. Meanwhile, of the minor arcs (none of which has been getting decent play lately), the big winners are the western arc and the MASH arc with counts in the mid thirties. The big losers are the caveman arc with only one showing besides the debut strip (but a good, clean, classical gag), and the mystery arc with only one showing at all.

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Todd and Penguin, Scary Go Round, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic, Real Life, Peanuts

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive, Theater Hopper, General Protection Fault, Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Pibgorn, Malfunction Junction, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: AppleGeeks, Achewood, Kismetropolis, Erfworld, Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break, Striptease, Punch an' Pie, Digger

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, Questionable Content, Starslip Crisis, Devil's Panties, Narbonic, Schlock Mercenary

Webcomics I read evenings: LuAnn, Count Your Sheep, Goats, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Sinfest, Little Dee

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition, Two Lumps, Zortic, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Home on the Strange, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: Girls With Slingshots, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Shortpacked, Get Out of My Head, Megatokyo, Buck Godot Zap Gun For Hire

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Station V3, Dinosaur Comics, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, Sheldon, PvP

Webcomics I read Sundays: xkcd, Minus, Smithson, Something Happens, Li'l Mell, Three Panel Soul, Butternut Squash, Perry Bible Fellowship, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Boxjam's Doodle

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Casey & Andy, 13 Seconds, Medium Large, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, Dandy & Company, Breakfast of the Gods, The Green Avenger, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, No Room for Magic, Anywhere But Here, The Whovian Observer, Gossamer Commons

See also The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, Talk About Comics, The Living Comic, Online Comics Day, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List, Mister Bloo, Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Mr. Myth, Comixpedia and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.