The good old days / We're back!
Originally published 11 April 2000
Originally published 8 May 2000

Sometimes people write me and ask why there's such a long gap in the archives between April 11 and May 8 2000. (Well, not so much anymore. I've taken some longer breaks since, including the current one.)

Still, it puzzles me how anyone could be so observant as to notice the gap, and so oblivious as to miss the style change. I spent that month trying to reinvent the strip's look, and in some ways its content, too. I actually considered redoing some older strips to make them better. I also considered restarting the strip's chronology, making everything before then sort of a rough draft. I'm happy I did neither of those things.

I'm a perfectionist, though. I'm not flighty enough to redesign the characters and the strip often--I only ever did it the one time, but I think it was important. It's hard to explain, but I had a feeling of having stretched the existing designs and style to their limits. It felt like riding a bicycle, when you reach that point where you're going fast enough that it gets really easy to pedal and you're not actally gaining any speed by doing it. So you switch gears, and it's harder and clumsier at first, but it allows you to pick up more speed.

The new designs were clumsy at first. And in the years since, the characters have changed even more than that just in the natural course of things. I probably didn't change the characters as much as I thought I was changing them, at the time. But it was still a very important step in the strip's development.

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