Irregular Webcomic! #3284

I'm writing this just hours before the next Sunday update is due. I've been sick for essentially the entire past week - I took the whole week off work. Since I normally type up long annotations on the train to and from work, I found myself here on Sunday afternoon with nothing ready for today's update.

So I've pulled out an old entry into the art competition I ran some years ago again.

And unfortunately as I was looking through old strips for anything involving Anakin, I found I'd already used this particular piece of artwork, by Gert Hansen, back in strip #1212. And I'm too worn out to do anything else now, so you get an art rerun. At least the dialogue is new, if kind of a by-the-numbers gag.

Ah well, as I always say when talking about webcomic publishing, predictability of new material is more important than quality. And interestingly enough, Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering at Wizards of the Coast, recently said exactly the same thing in one of his regular (note!) Monday columns on Daily MtG just last week: Communications Theory:

In the 70s, a major newspaper did a giant amount of market research to discover why people read their paper. The number two answer was to "get the news." The number one answer was "because I do it every day." We learned this in school because it drives home a very important point. The habit (or comfort) of media is more important than the content. The audience will prioritize comfort of the presentation over quality of the content. I cannot stress how important this concept is.

His article has much wider application than just game design, or even webcomic creation. If you've come here today hoping to read something interesting and inspiring by me, you could do a lot worse than head over and read Mark Rosewater's article. It's actually something very close to what I might have written myself. Or at least I like to think so.