Paul Gadzikowski

• Wed, 19:00: Hero of Three Faces update: one of these days, Alice. https://t.co/UuOpcXhQa4 #superman #guinan
• Wed, 21:08: Happy A.A. Milne's birthday by the way. Or perhaps I should say, HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY
• Wed, 22:53: I told my coworkers yesterday that I expect to be out Friday with the orange flu.
• Thu, 05:55: heroofthreefaces: aegipan-omnicorn: truth-has-a-liberal-bias: johnnyonespur: Friday, Jan. 20, 2017, the... https://t.co/mCryZBSibr
• Thu, 06:02: The west was built on #racism. It's time we faced that. #slavery https://t.co/A1f7WzaHhs
• Thu, 06:04: 2016 hottest year ever recorded – and scientists say human activity to blame #climatechange https://t.co/B5EiYxmrEz
• Thu, 06:53: I have probably forgotten everything I once knew about professional grade art materials but that was 1985 so it's all changed anyway.
• Thu, 06:56: Today's the first time in 2017 I thought, "It would have been thirty years in October."

Friday's Arthur, King of Time and Space reflected that I am once again considering, and more seriously this time, converting AKOTAS permanently to triangles from line drawing. As of this writing, in reaction to Friday's cartoon, I've received two lukewarm comments against the idea and none in favor.

Today marks eight years of consecutive daily updates at AKOTAS. I made the decision at the beginning to create it in line art because I knew that appeals better to a general audience than the triangle style. For much of eight years I have wished I had decided otherwise. Despite several occasions when triangle style has been evoked under emergency circumstances (usually for only a day at a time but, now, twice for weeks at a stretch), I have resisted making the change because I feel a reasonable expectation has been created for the readership that line art will be the standard.

The thing about line art in webcartoons - the thing that induced the switch, in effect to this day, to triangle style for my fanfiction webcartoons in 2001 - is that line art relies on computer peripherals that break down and can't always be promptly repaired or replaced. Every other production decision I made at the beginning of AKOTAS - working in MSPaint, what font to use, to code the site myself in what HTML I know so that anything that goes wrong is something that I did and that I can fix myself - was in aid of streamlining production so I could produce cartoons at any Windows PC in the world, so AKOTAS would never miss a scheduled update.

And I like the triangles. I like minimalism for its own sake. I deny it's a lesser style because it's simpler and faster. For my purposes it's better because of those things. And it's distinct: it won't ever be confused with someone else's work.

I like the triangles better. Yet there's still that nagging reasonable expectation I feel I've created for the AKOTAS readership.

But then there's this:

You may remember this drawing from my LJ entry of 2/20/12. In the comments then I said I wasn't seriously considering switching to this style for AKOTAS because of, in so many words, the reasonable expectation thing, but that was a little disingenuous.

I could do this without a scanner or a drawing tablet. It wouldn't be quite as time efficient as the triangles (but it's actually less time efficient to produce this style from scanned line art). It could be done with tablet line art or with the line or shape tools in MSPaint.

I am probably going to switch to this style at AKOTAS sometime in the next week, to try it out. If I never switch back, you'll know what I decided. But if I switch back to triangles about a week afterwards, that might represent a permanent decision.