About Irregular Webcomic!

Is that you?
Yes. Comics are hard to draw. Taking photos is easier. Photos of me are mostly done with a tripod and auto-timer.

How often is there a new comic?
Historically:

• Strips 7-3198: Daily. However, I'm not commited to a schedule. This webcomic is Irregular. Get it? You get what you pay for.
• Strips 3199-3380: The original comics reran from day 1 (beginning on 31 October, 2011), with a new rerun appearing at the usual time on Mondays to Saturdays. On Sundays, there is brand new content, but it is not a comic. Instead it is an extended annotation in which I talk about... whatever's on my mind. Often science or history or other fun topics.
• Strips 3381-3530: New comics appear on Sundays and Thursdays, and old comics are rerun with new commentary on the other days of the week.
• Strips 3531-3915: New comics appear on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and old comics are rerun with new commentary on other days.
• Strips 3916-present: New comics appear Mondays to Fridays, and old comics are rerun with new commentary on weekends.

But so far this comic has been more regular than many webcomics that actually claim to be updated regularly!
Life is ironic, isn't it?

Can I link to specific strips in my website/blog/journal/Ph.D. thesis?
Sure, but please make sure you link back to the site with an <a href="..."> tag, and not just to the strip image with an <img src="..."> tag. This lets any interested people follow the link and find the entire site.

I'd like to use a comic/annotation for educational purposes. May I?
Yes, by all means! As long as you're not selling my work, feel free to use any of it to initiate discussion and thought in any students you think might get something useful out of it.

Do you have a list of comics with educational annotations?
Indeed I do! It's right here.

I have a great idea for a comic you could do! Can I send it to you?
You can if you wish. However I get a lot of suggestions and can make no guarantees I'll ever use your idea. I keep a file full of strip ideas, and it keeps getting bigger, not smaller. Also, although I am certainly grateful and appreciative of the suggestions I do end up using, I prefer not to name specific idea contributors, so please don't request "Mention my name if you use this idea". If you're happy with that condition, send your idea to my address at the bottom of the page. Thanks!

You do realise that:

• chimpanzees don't have tails
• your German grammar sucks
• your knowledge of Star Wars sucks
• your knowledge of James Bond sucks
• Coruscant is actually physically plausible because...
• etc, etc...

You left an option out of the poll! I need "other"! I don't know how to answer the poll! The poll makes no sense!
I like to construct the poll questions so as to make you think rather than simply picking the obvious answer. So frequently I deliberately leave the most obvious answer out, or I make the available options vague, or I make the poll so downright weird that there is no sensible answer. What I want you to do is think about it for a bit and then pick the answer that makes you happiest. If it's not perfect, oh well. And I almost never include an "other" option, because I want you to pick one of the options that are there. It's more interesting that way.

Vision-impaired? What?
This is an option so that people who can't read the dialogue on the actual comic graphic can have the script displayed in text format, so it can be read out by screen-reading software. I figure just because you may not be able to see, that's no reason not to enjoy comics. You may also notice that sometimes the vision-impaired scripts spell a word out. I try to do this when it would help someone using screen-reader software to understand some wordplay or pun that requires noticing a difference in spelling for words that sound similar.

Is Irregular Webcomic! available on LiveJournal?
I'm glad you asked! Irregular Webcomic! is available via a LiveJournal syndication feed. Add it to your friends list and see the comics in your friends journal page! You can also check the feed's syndication information.

Is there an official discussion forum for Irregular Webcomic!?
Why yes, yes there is. There's also a LiveJournal syndication feed if you'd rather discuss the comic there.

Can I make a T-shirt/coffee mug/mouse pad/poster with an Irregular Webcomic! strip printed on it?
Sure! I have released all strips under a Creative Commons licence which allows you to use them for any non-commercial purpose provided you give me proper credit. I still own copyright in the strips, but I am allowing other people to use them under the specific provisions of Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. You may not sell anything with my comics on them! If you do, I'll send Draak around to beat you up.

Have you thought of publishing a book of collected strips?
Yes! In fact, you can buy the first two books right now! Keep an eye out for announcements on new books.

Where did you get the miniatures you use for Iki Piki, Serron, and Spanners?
None of them are what you think they are - I did custom mods on all of them to convert them.

• Spanners is a Thri-Kreen from the "official AD&D" line by Ral Partha. I cut off the double-ended spear thingy and glued on a gun.
• Serron is a Rakshasa from the same line. All I needed to do was stick on a gun.
• Iki Piki is based on a Necromunda House Van Saar Juve by Games Workshop. I filed the head down to make it a bit smaller, then moulded a custom head shape out of Milliput (Green Stuff or some other cold-setting modelling putty would work as well) and poked a bunch of tiny plastic strips cut from Evergreen Scale Models polystyrene rod 0.64 mm × 36 cm (product item number 219) into the top of it to form the feelers. (It may conceivably have been the 0.51 mm or 0.76 mm thickness rods, but I think 0.64 looks about right.)

I don't get the joke in this strip.
I don't expect everyone to get all of the jokes. If you come to a joke you don't understand, simply skip over it and attempt the next joke. You can return to any you've skipped at the end if you have time. And remember to show all your working.

Why do you explain some of the jokes in the annotations? That ruins the joke!
I explain some of the jokes because I use some pretty obscure references sometimes, and I like to make sure that more than 1% of my audience understands what's going on. If it really bothers you, don't read the annotations. Seriously - I'm not forcing you to read them. You can even turn them off using the options so you don't even have to see them.

I'm starting my own comic. What software do you use to handle the updates and stuff? Can I have a copy?
The software I use is hand-written by me, and is an unholy combination of HTML, JavaScript, CGI, perl, PHP, and MySQL code, glued together with Unix shell scripts and cron jobs. It sort of evolved organically, so there's no rhyme or reason to it. If you wanted to use it, you'd need to be a good coder in all those languages to even understand what the heck I've done. And then you'd need to be able to hack it to pieces to customise it to your own purposes, because your site almost certainly won't look exactly like mine. And quite frankly, if you know this stuff, it'll be faster for you to write your own code to do exactly what you want rather than try to figure out and adapt mine. Given that, and the fact that it would take me half a day to pull all the bits together and package it in a form that someone else might even have a faint chance of understanding, I'm afraid the answer has to be no, I can't realistically give you a copy. Although I don't have any problem with the idea of another site using my code, it's just too much hard work for both of us. On a more positive note: If you don't have website coding skills, I recommend you try one of the several free webcomic hosting sites out there. Just Google "webcomic hosting". These sites have simple setups that allow you to publish comics with a minimum of fuss. And on the other hand, if you do have website coding skills, you're better off writing your own code and not risking your sanity with the horrific cyclopean non-Euclidean mess I concocted.

Say, I like your comic. I'd like to send you a donation/gift!
Cool! If you are motivated by my work to contribute something, please see the Donations page for information on contributing to charity in the name of Irregular Webcomic!, or see my Patreon page for becoming a patron of my work.