112 – Exploring the Cradle
Greetings fellow readers! Kalin here.
We’ve had quite the (not entirely planned) lull in Prince of Sartar’s posting history, and we’re sorry for how things turned out. However, as of this month the comic has been back on track! Now, some of you who follow us and support us on Patreon (thank you!) area already aware of the announcement we made, but it bears repeating here for the rest of our readers.
As of this month, and at least for the next few, Prince of Sartar will be moving to a monthly posting schedule. My hope is that this will help eliminate the skips of one to two weeks (or months, in this case…) that keep happening when either Jeff or I get hit with work that must take precedent over the webcomic. So instead of a new page every Sunday, what you will all get instead is all of the pages for the month posted, one after the other, at the end of the month. The first one is today, and the next three shall be posted in the following days, so be sure to come back tomorrow for the next one!
While this means that there will be periods during the month itself where no new pages will be up, we do hope this will make the comic go back to a consistent post rate.
With that, I want to say thank you to all of those who stuck with us, and I hope you will come back to following the comic regularly once more.
It’s good news as long as it’s back! 🙂
Huzzah! I’m glad to see the comic return!
Wow. Glad to see the comic is back with a new page, and looking forward to regular updates! Thanks, Kalin!
What is that stuff that looks like throw pillows?
Huh, honestly I had forgotten that this webcomic was around. Hurrah for RSS!
Can’t you do some kind of cron job to post once a week? WordPress can do that, schedule postings in advance.
What are those spiky pillow things? Generic treasure?
Good to have you back. A Monthly schedule will slow the pace down quite a bit though. Will the sroty be concluded in a few years?
Well first to address the most asked question – Those are not pillows, they are oxhide ingots. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxhide_ingot)
Now as for the comic schedule – Yes, I can make it post once a week, I can schedule a page to show up on whatever date and time I choose. However we moved to posting 4 pages per month instead of one per four weeks because it makes working on the comic easier for me, as I am not constantly up to a deadline every single week.
I do suspect it might make the pacing kind of slow as all the pages will show up together at the end of the month, which is why we’re experimenting. If we find we don’t like how this works, we’ll get back to updating once per week.
As for concluding the story? I don’t think either I or Jeff really know. The comic is a passion project more than anything else, so we’ll work on it for as long as working on it is enjoyable and not an awful chore. We’ll definitely finish the first tome and publish it in dead tree form, but beyond that? Who knows.
I don’t mean do it once a week. Do them all together like you do now, but schedule them to post once a week. So it spreads them out and keeps the interest going. It’s hard to keep interest in a web comic that doesn’t post new comics on a regular schedule. I’d rather have 4 comics spread out over a month than 4 comics all together once a month.
Have a look at “King of Sartar” and look where we are in the timeline.
It seems that you and Jeff have to get older than the expected maximum of 122 to get the complete story told. 🙂
welcome back! What I’d do to maintain your sanity is to get a month’s worth done in advance (which you’ve already done) and then dribble them out once a week. Meanwhile you can get the next month’s done on your own time without having a weekly deadline. So in other words, do exactly like you’re doing but instead of posting them in a burst at the end of the month, just post one a week, keeping the rest in reserve. So you’ll always have some pages already finished, waiting until you need it. I think that is what Yossarian is getting at. I think it’ll work better in terms of keeping your fans engaged, even if it means requiring some delay of gratification on our part. Looking forward to the further adventures of our heroes!
Theprof – I don’t want to sound condescending, but this is really not how things work in the real world. I’ve tried to maintain a backlog of the comic, and for a couple of years we even managed to do it. But again, this is not a priority project for either Jeff or me, and so when there’s more important work to be done, we have to do that first. The result of which is that said backlog evaporates and never, ever recovers.
Because when there aren’t regular updates to the comic, it’s not because we’re just sitting around and wasting our time, it’s because either Jeff and/or I are too busy working on a billion other different things to even get to Prince of Sartar. The reason we are trying out this model is exactly, specifically because *I can’t* do the thing you are suggesting.
well, knowing entirely too well how the real world works myself (I too work in a field of self-guided deadlines), I predict that you’ll end up at the monthly deadlines only having time to do one page. But that’s okay, do what you can. We appreciate it! 🙂
Could someone tell me why did Lionfish surprise so much?
He knew there are a lot of treasures in the cradle.
Are ingots so matter to them?
That’s probably more iron than he’s ever seen in his entire life, all in one place.