2/4/25
This is the second time I've reformatted the Hero of Three Faces website here on the Arthur, King of Time and Space domain. The first time was in 2014 to add the chronological order navigation, and to implement what I called "slideshow format" which only lasted a few months before I went back to "panel-per-screen" format. If you like, you can read what I wrote about that at the time on that format's About page. All those pages are still here, just as the first reformat didn't remove the original format's pages, and there are links to the archives of both previous formats in the header links of every page in the new format (however this is now the only page which links to the old About page). Before The Hero of Three Faces was located here, it was updated at the now-defunct Webcomicsnation.com website from the beginning of 2007 till the middle of 2008. Before that, there were triangle figure fanfiction cartoons without any umbrella title of their own on the website where I still have archived the cartoons and prose of my Usenet-era fanfiction crossover multiverse c.1995-c.2005. I've been drawing my fanfiction comic strips this way instead of with line drawing since 2001 when I couldn't replace a broken scanner and couldn't draw freehand in MSPaint because we had a trackball instead of a mouse. And before the internet I drew daily comic strips on paper with pencil which I circulated at school and at parties in three-ring binders starting in 1976. I look at the numbers of cartoons I've drawn on paper and on my two websites and on my social media, and I'm confident I've drawn an average of a cartoon a day since I was sixteen.
And I mean to go on doing it till the day I die. I'm relying on the stimulation of the creative work to keep me mentally and intellectually acute in the way geriatric specialists recommend for keeping the mind exercised. Nevertheless, earlier this year I realized I was feeling an encroachment of regarding the daily routines of updating as a chore rather than as a calling. After all I am sixty-five years old, much as I like to say in my social forum profile bios that I've been "twelve years old since 1971". I decided I needed to streamline the website for the sake of keeping the daily housekeeping from becoming too much of a burden on top of actually scripting and drawing a gag.
This primarily meant two or three things, I decided. 1) Simplfying the site navigation in aid of cutting down on daily HTML file editing. Basically, ditching the panel-per-screen format for the panel tower format I'd used on The Hero of Three Faces before 2011. I even briefly considered no longer linking the individual cartoons' pages in chronological order. Maybe next time, if there has to be a next time. 2) Importing only a couple dozen cartoons from the existing archive, rather than all eleven years of them, into a new one. (With the option of adding more older cartoons to the new archive after the new format launches, like last time. Got a favorite I didn't bring over? Ask, though I make no promises.) Which shares mutual causality with the last change: 3) Removing the daily fourth-wall-breaking BLM and trans rights protesters outside the panel boundaries in existing panel image files, and leaving them off from new cartoons in the new archive. When I started adding the outpanel protester figures to individual panel images in February 2015, it was with the feeling that it would be letting the side down if I ever stopped while The Hero of Three Faces was still an ongoing title. But they were another daily step in the process and I was afraid it was a choice between letting them go (along with everything else I was streamlining out of the procedures) or burning out on doing the comic strip at all. Which meant any imports of cartoons after 2015 from the 2014 archive would have to have the protesters edited out because those images are structured for panel-per-screen format. But the prospect of letting the protesters go bothered me enough that, during the preproduction of the new format, I came up with a way of bringing them in without their being part of the panels' image files ... as you have, no doubt, noticed. They'll switch out less often than daily, perhaps considerably less, but at least they're still here.
So this, if you were wondering, is the reason for the changes. If you follow me on Tumblr or Patreon you already knew this was happening and why. I'm also on Pillowfort and Bluesky. My email address is in the header above and this paragraph is subject to future editing for update of contact information.
Thanks for reading.
