Irregular Webcomic! #3382

When starting to make new comics again after three and a half years (has it really been that long?!*), one of the things I needed to decide on was what format to use. I knew I wanted a standard four panel format like the old strips, but there was some freedom in how to present four panels. With such a break, I could change things up a bit and start to do things differently.

For example, I could change the speech balloons. When I started making the comic in 2002, I didn't know how to make speech balloon shapes with outlines, like conventional comics. So I adapted and made the balloons as pastel coloured shapes with no outline, hovering above the image panels, rather than outlined white shapes inside the panels like most comics. For better or worse, that decision grew to be a defining feature of Irregular Webcomic! over the years.

And so, although I flirted with the idea of doing this restart with a more conventional comic format, I fairly quickly decided that I shouldn't mess around with the old format too much. Because maybe then it just wouldn't feel like Irregular Webcomic! any more. And in fact the only thing I've changed so far is the size of the comic, making it and the dialogue font a little bigger. With everyone having bigger screens and more pixels these days, I figured it was time the comics stretched out to fill a 1024-pixel-wide window.

The other thing I'm doing now is saving higher resolution versions of the comics, suitable for printing. When printed, all the old comics look slightly pixelated and blocky. But these new ones might possibly make it into some sort of book collection one day, and look good in it.

This particular strip, by the way, picks up the story of our intrepid band of heroes shortly after we last saw them.

* Yes, it has.