It really would have been more well timed if this was the end of Chapter 13 instead of the start of the Interlude with it being a new year and all.

Anyway, first a today’s comic related thing: I have some regrets with using the labels this way, because I used remarkably similar labels last page to represent an in-comic effect, while this time it is a UI layer effect. It just sort of occurred to me that labeling the characters that we have seen before, but do not actually know the names of (most of them) and may not recognize due to copious art drift and never really knowing who the character was originally might be actually useful.

Next comic I’ll talk about going forward, and probably ramble a bit, with a side of blathering here and there. For this comic, let’s just talk about this year in summary real quick…

Overall, I think it was a good year. We had some buffer struggles in the last quarter of it, but I overall updates were pretty regular. August was a rough month for patreon losing quite a few, but several strong months followed by December being the best month we’ve ever had for new patrons has more than offset it for an overall patron growth. All I can say on that front is thanks to all the amazing people! You’re the best.

New traffic has definitely slowed down, with more than 80% of traffic clocking in at returning readers now. I don’t think this is a huge problem, but I imagine that most people here found the comic through Project Wonderful, so there’s still not quite a way to fill that void. New traffic from TWC has sharply declined as well. That said… I don’t know if it’s really a problem. We have a lot of readers (more than I ever expected times a lot!) and reader retention has year-to-year has been pretty high.

Anyway… I said real quick, and it’s starting to look long… so I’ll leave anything else for the future. Maybe I will separate it out into a blog post for the next update. Been awhile since I made a blog post.

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