GPF News Archive

Welcome back, everyone! If it isn't blatantly obvious by the brand spanking new comic on the front page, yes, GPF is back! Well... sort of. Let me explain....

As mentioned in the previous posts, ending our two-month hiatus hasn't been easy. I had some very stringent requirements that I wanted to meet before updating again, and the quantity of those requirements met would have a direct affect on the frequency of updates when the comic would return. Well, I've met the bare minimum of those requirements, and as you might guess, the relationship between requirements met and update frequency is directly proportional, however much I wish that relationship were the inverse.

In plain English, GPF will now resume a regular update schedule, but only updating once per week, every Monday, until further notice. It's not what I had hoped for by a long shot, but it's certainly better than nothing.

If you want the gory details of the return, you can always check out the Webcomics category in my blog. Long story short, between the baby, the new job, and things related to buying and selling houses, finding time to work on comics has been like pulling teeth. Unfortunately, they're incredibly strong teeth from a guy who brushes and flosses three times a day and has freakishly healthy gums. (Dentists hate this guy.) I've been managing to steal a few hours here and there, but nothing in a really solid block of time where I could completely focus on producing art. I'm happy to say, though, that we're pretty much completely settled into the new house and the old house finally has a closing date, so when those issues go away I should have a bit more free time. However, I'm still losing two hours every day to my daily commute and my son's still demanding those late night bottle feedings, so things are still pretty hectic in the Darlington household.

The biggest caveat to having such a drastically reduced update frequency is that it's going to take seemingly forever to finish To Thine Own Self.... As previously mentioned, I have absolutely no intention of cutting this story short; I've already invested far too much in it already, and we're already in the big climax anyway. The finale is so tightly packed that there's very little fat to trim. I also want to keep the comic style sequence consistent (one color Sunday followed by six gray scale dailies) for when this eventually makes its way into book form (crossing my fingers on that one). Unfortunately, that means I'm continuing to script and produce the comic as if I were working seven days per week. When I calculated spreading that out for updates at only one per week, I think I projected that the story will tentatively end on September 22nd, 2008! Needless to say, I'm not happy about that. I think, however, that once Ben matures enough that he doesn't need constant supervision, I should be able develop a more stable and predictable update schedule and can then increase the frequency to something a bit more palatable for all of us. That, I hope, will have us finishing the story in two years or less, rather than nearly an embarrassingly long three.

I want to thank everyone for their incredible amount of support and patience. While there's been some grumblings, the overwhelming majority of you have been absolutely wonderful and understanding. I especially thank those of you who have e-mailed me your gratitude and support, sent me well-wishes in the blog comments, and kept the forum active. (Well, the forum's been active enough thanks to some spammers, but I mean with real discussions.) I know I'm continuing to ask for your patience—after all, spreading what used to be a week's worth of content over the course almost two months is going to be agonizingly slow—but I'm really banking on that solidarity you guys have shown me the past several months. If you guys can continue to have faith that GPF is going to continue, I'll do my absolute best to not disappoint.

On that note, I'll leave and say I'll see you next week. But first, some important things that bear repeating: While the overwhelming majority of the archive has now been transcribed, there's always the opportunity to improve some of our Oh No Robot transcriptions; just make sure to follow the rules set forth in the January 9th News post and the related Oh No Robot forum thread. Don't forget that if you find yourself scratching your head over the current events in the comic itself, make sure to check out the News post from November 6, 2005, which includes a bunch of notes and back references that should help clear up some of the confusion. Also, additional notes for the Official Unofficial GPF Wiki can be fond in this forum thread.