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Commission — Mixtape

🕑 Added 2022-02-08 23:00:04 +0000 UTC

Comments

Brad Guigar

This is mostly correct. Only one small correction. They were built to be the Saturday strip. There were only two Sunday strips over the four-and-a-half year run of daily Greystone Inn comics. (And those were done to submit the strip to newspaper syndicates.) See… it became very clear in the early 2000s that Internet traffic dropped to negligible levels over the weekends. And when I had important plot points on Saturday, my readers completely missed them. For a one-week storyline that meant the resolution would appear on Saturdays and get missed by my readers! BUT, I was still trying to land a contract with syndicates during that time. Also, I had begun self-syndicating in 2001, and was just successful enough that I needed to continue. So I had to have *something* for Saturdays. And that’s where all of those Saturday featured originated.

Caleb Davis

My understanding was that the Personnel Files, as well as the Phone Gags and the Hallway Doors were comic strips that were the result of newspapers having different print schedules. Papers that had a Sunday Paper needed an extra comic strip, but Newspapers that didn't couldn't fall behind by a week of essential plot in the ongoing story. So Personnel Files, or stand-alone jokes like the Phone Gags and Hallway Doors, were used to create a Sunday comic strip without having other Papers fall behind. With the reboot, the comic shifted to it's model as a webcomic with full pages instead of new-strips. This eliminated the need for strips that didn't follow the core plot. At least to the best of my recollection.

Brad Guigar

That’s tremendous! 🙂

Michael Howles-Banerji

I agree with the other commenters who are in favor of the Personnel files. I loved them when I first started reading. I used to print them out and color them during a stint at a monotonous college job.

Brad Guigar

They became a lower priority as other projects became more important 🙂

coolraul07

@Brad, Seriously, what was your reasoning for dropping them? Did you find that they painted you in a corner, narrative-wise? I remember you posted years ago about the lessons you learned from the "old" universe and you were incorporating them in the "reboot" universe. You gave a couple of examples, but I don't recall you specifically mentioning Personnel Files.