I think it’s safe to say this station doesn’t have a “no repeat at work” guarantee.

The week beforehand was spent primarily retooling the site – I’d never done a WordPress / Comicpress upgrade before, and relearning my way around the million and one hacks and kludges that I put into the old site took longer than I thought.

So eventually I got this new layout working, which affords me some extra space to make the comics bigger, and finally gets the long-awaited ability to browse by category as well as by date in. There’s less ads, less junk filling up the page and more space for all these blog posts.

And I still wasn’t happy.

It took me until New Year’s Day to realise what was going on – no matter how much I painted over the exterior, I wasn’t happy with what Funny Webcomic is. To me there’s a lot ‘broken’ with the underlying DNA and no amount of site layout tweaking is going to fix that.

As I kind of alluded to in an earlier comic, I hate the name of this site. It comes off as pretentious and arrogant and it was a bad idea. In fact so much of what’s bugging me about the site stems from the bad ideas – or the complete lack of thought – I put into the site when I started it.

The changing of themes every day was another problem. What is Funny Webcomic about? It’s…lots of things? Some weeks it’s about a chocolate bar, some days it’s about a dog, some updates it’s about…a game reviewer? In my mind I was doing one comic consistently, but in reality I was doing a dozen separate comics sporadically. I like doing some of them more than others, and there are some that I really don’t want to do right now but I’m staying up to 2am doing them anyway and they don’t turn out good.

Ultimately I wasn’t having fun and I want to have fun again.

So, as you might have been able to tell in the weeks since January 1, I’m making a couple of changes!

I’m changing the update schedule. Which would you rather have every week, five comics that are OK or three that are actually good? My focus now is to make comics I’m happy with, rather than just update because it’s Tuesday.

Speaking of which, I’m sticking to a theme for extended periods instead of changing what the comic is about every day. Right now I really just want to do Hive FM, it’s a comic I never really gave enough of a chance when first attempted it a few years back and I think there’s a good run of comics in here. It’s also letting me mix characters that are usually by themselves together, which is fun!

So don’t fret, fans of White Teenagers With Problems or Presidog or whatever, those strips will be back at some point I’m sure. I know I definitely want to return to Suburban Life Stories at some point and every now and then I’ll bust one out when the mood strikes. But the most important thing is that I’m just going to do a comic when have a good idea for one, not just because I feel like I “should”.

And for the last few weeks, I can honestly say I’m having more fun making comics than I have in AGES. I’m also hand drawing a lot more, which is great, and spending more time on the writing and experimenting with odd ideas. I hope you think the changes have worked…

So! Thanks for following along with this new stage of this silly comic – its going to be a great year!

Drives me nuts about how all the newspapers and TV news and what have you cry about how disappointing the new Apple device is – even though nobody at any point promised anything about it. Maybe I’m just cynical but it’s almost like the established media had some axe to grind, or perhaps some agenda, that would cause them to denounce the advent of a new wave of decentralised information broadcasting systems?

Nah, couldn’t be.

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I just realised I passed up a chance to get out of drawing a newspaper by drawing an iPad instead! Agh I’ll never become a super star cartoonist at this (or any rate).

Done because I just know every single commercial radio station in the world is going to have their Monday morning breakfast show hosts falling over themselves to gush about how much they loved her even though they never played her music or mentioned her except as a joke. Have I mentioned commercial breakfast radio really bugs me sometimes?

Big thanks to Mister J for writing one of the lines in the comic, and a whole week’s worth of Whitney-related comics too. The man’s a champ!

Or continue the conversation on their Facebook page or send them an email, whatever it takes to increase the listener database we can sell to advertisers.

Tune in tomorrow when Action Sally tries to recover from her amnesia by asking people to hit her on the head with a  frying pan.

Yep, Henry is now in the Hive FM offices, OH MY GOD ALL THE STREAMS ARE CROSSING.

What a soothing sound to have your alarm clock give to you at five freakin’ thirty in the morning.

If you haven’t guessed yet I do most of the writing for this comic at five thirty in the morning when the alarm clock kicks in and drills three morons being hilarious until I give up and get up out of bed.