The page rate is deceptively slow when you zoom in on a select few days. There was a 6 day pause, then 13 pages went up. So that's about 2 pages per day, which is "slow", right? But then you wait a few more days, and 23 pages have stacked up, and suddenly that rate jumps to 4 pages per day, which is close to the site average. And if you examine the period between now and 10 days ago, the rate is almost 8 pages per day, which is way above average. It's better to think of the output in longer term averages. This is harder for those who demand regularity and predictability, which is something you get from some comics which update once every weekday, or m/w/f, without fail as part of their product delivery pledge. In these cases, the regularity of the output strikes me as being almost as important, and sometimes more important, than the quality of the content itself. This is because people are creatures of habit, and have a strong craving for reliability. Many will quite happily absorb work they consider to be fairly mediocre as long as it is cranked out like clockwork. The sunday funnies is probably a good long term example of this. Millions of people gobbled up decades of Marmaduke without ever laughing once, but editors wouldn't dare fuck with Marmaduke because people needed that shit with their coffee for some reason. You could put a gun to their head and they couldn't tell you why. There is comfort in even bland routine. If you mess with people's comfort and destabilize certain regularities in their universe, they become agitated, even angry.

Now, if people actually have any sort of passion for the entertainment comprising their routine, then they become even more agitated if the output is disturbed. Passionate interest severely exacerbates the situation, and can make a creator envy someone like Marmaduke Guy who spent his career crouching safely in mediocrity, grinding out awful dog comics everyone became totally comfortable with disliking. (I bet he never got an angry letter from an anime fan.) But if you mess with the schedule of material that people zealously crave, they are not merely irked, but can receive it as a personal affront from the author. This is true in varying degrees for probably most enthusiastic readers, but is more pronounced by the degree to which a person is mentally ill.

There are some particularly unpleasant entities out there who pose questions similar to yours, but much less politely. These are seemingly self appointed watchdogs for my page rate, and I think I'm safe in assuming most are severely under-medicated teens with a bigtime beef about You Fucking Name It. As torrid a pace as Homestuck has been unloaded on the public, I think it must have been pretty easy for some spoiled children to factor that rate of output into the entitlement complex which presides over their central nervous systems. Deviation from that production schedule in the minds of the entitled means nothing other than offense committed by the author, or more generously, just a staggering display of laziness. Never mind that the alleged deviation may not even QUITE exist (see numbers in first paragraph). But if it did, I wonder whose rate of production they would compare it to, aside from some foggy recollection of my own?

For such people, what would probably be useful would be a dose of perspective. Not that they're likely to read this, but let's consider the following data anyway, kindly provided by tvtropes.com.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WebcomicsLongRunners

MSPA is the longest web comic on record, in terms of update quantity. It accumulated most of this content in about 3 years. Now consider that the second comic on the list is approximately THE OLDEST WEB COMIC IN EXISTENCE. It dates back to 1995, which for all intents and purposes was the year the internet was born.

There are of course some mitigating factors. Most MSPA updates are a single panel, with some accompanying text. But there are some counter-caveats which make this a bit more difficult to process. There are several hours of animated Flash footage mixed in with the updates. There are several more hours of interactive gameplay. Each Flash instance occupies a single update. Many updates are accompanied by several pages of dialogue. Some of these individual conversations would take up 50 pages worth of speech bubbles in a graphic novel. The total word count for MSPA likely exceeds most of the comics on that list, or possibly all of them. It wouldn't be surprising. Homestuck alone is over 300K words. Again, this effort was compressed into the last 3 years, while most of the other comics date back to the 90's.

What does this mean? Here is what it means.

Let's imagine MSPA was distributed more like a "normal comic". Where, even with a healthy update schedule of 7 days a week, you still only get one new thing to click on. One update per day. It could be a simple panel with a silly gag and no text. Could be a panel with 10 pages of dialogue beneath it. Or it could be a 3 minute flash animation. All are things that appear in the archive in good supply. Distributing one such thing per day, as the designated "product", would be a completely reasonable policy. If that were the established pattern from the start, nobody would think it was remotely inappropriate, and nobody would ask for more, in the same way that nobody ever demands that Penny Arcade update 7 days a week instead of 3.

If that were the case, MSPA would now have 16 years worth of content.

So what does THIS mean??

It means, given that I started 3 years ago, I could take a 13 year break starting now, and at the end of that break, MSPA's lifetime rate of production would still manage to make the lifetime rate of most other comics seem underwhelming. This is literally, actually true, even though it sounds like a joke. There is statistical evidence to support this, using the only data that matters, which is the existing work of peers in the same field.

So if some twerp who's never put a stretch of hard work into anything aside from grinding for levels in WoW all weekend decides to get on my case about slowing down, I think I'll just start whispering "13 year break..."


13 year break.........



13 year break............................




13







year










break.









P.S. I wonder how many frowns this question would get if you could frown at things?

P.P.S. smile @ this question if you don't like idea of 13 year break :) :) :) :) :)

nobody because I have a life to live