A general observation
In the mind of some readers, the two most recent strips account for a gigantic part of their overall impression of the comic. If they like the strips, Sandra and Woo is one of the funniest comics on the web. If they don’t like them, Sandra and Woo has jumped the shark twice and will never become good again. This attitude was definitely less pronounced in the early years of Sandra and Woo. This is quite puzzling to me since the newest strips account for such a tiny fraction of the complete works nowadays.
Many people also don’t seem to understand that I can’t predict at all how well a strip will be received unless it’s obviously a spectacular one. [1052] Core Memory was universally loved, the most recent one [1061] Anonymous Tip not so much. But before publication, I pretty much had the same “This is an okay strip.” mindset about both strips!
Think about the difference between “Tom and Jerry” and “Watership Down”. One is pseudo-violence played for laughs where the injured character basically recovers by the next episode if not the next scene, the other is characters who are very much dead due to the violence, and in some cases their main reason for existing is to have said violence perpetrated upon themselves. People who like Tom and Jerry therefore are likely not always the same people who like Watership Down and in fact may adversely react to it, even if the type of violence is similar between the two.
Some of the readers are not satisfied because you’re not giving them what they want.
Some of them are very vocal about it.
The reality is that you create this strip for YOU and you’ve been wonderful to invite us along for the ride. If people don’t like what you’re creating, let them go read Nancy. For that matter, Nancy has had its share of detractors too, lately, but that doesn’t change the fact that the author is doing great things with the strip, IMHO.
In other words, don’t worry about the complainers. A lot of us have been here from the beginning and we’re so happy that we’re not going anywhere. Hopefully the ones that are dissatisfied can go find something else to complain about.
I didn’t really have a problem with any of the strips lately, but if you don’t see the difference between 1052 and 1061, you’re not looking.
Hint: Sex.
The fact is, Sandra and Woo just has a very broad subject matter, in that it’s not consistent from strip to strip. More casual readers will have a harder time nailing down “what Sandra and Woo is” as a result, which limits the universality of its appeal somewhat.
Just as important is the fact that the characters are ever so slightly distinct from the premise, enough that the strip can’t really be said to have a single premise – despite the strip’s title being comprised of the names of the main characters.
To break it down more: Sometimes it’s Slice of Life, sometimes it’s Slapstick Comedy (with or without consequences), Serious, Risque/Suggestive, Cultural Commentary, etc. There’s a large range of other tropes that the different episodes could each fall into, as well, not all necessarily the same.
This is just the truth, not a criticism necessarily. It is in a category of entertainment that is not so mainstream these days, among contemporaries that are largely plot-focused, rather than episodic, and do not vary in tone.
Heck, compare S&W to Gaia, which narrowly stands out as primarily just a few things: Slice of Life, (occasionally dark) Fantasy, and fairly serious in tone, but colorful and with just a hint of Mystery and Romance. It’s fairly easy to see the kind of audience it will speak to, compared to S&W – and while the exact content each episode contains may not be predictable, its appeal is.
That is something you cannot say about S&W, which is why you see so little consistency in approval from page to page.
Again, not a negative criticism. That’s just the kind of strip S&W is.
pft don’t worry about it, I see people complaining about the direction Least I Could Do story arcs are taking every week
you have to remember that there are not 2 categories but 3 categories of readers :
1) the complainers (think SJW and useless feminists, not all the feminists, just the useless ones)
2) the complimenters (like the complainers, but with a positive message instead, these ones are good to have)
3) those like me who won’t say anything at all most of the time even though they enjoy what they’re reading (the silent masses who probably represent 99% of a readership)
My thing was mostly that I was simply confused by what was going on regarding this and the previous panel,and at the point was. It felt like there was some kind of political joke related, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt like it relied on me having to know something about recent news, but as I’m not a big news watcher, I was kind of in the dark.
Looking at it again, I wonder now it’s a Zootopia joke with a ‘prey’ eating a preditor really flipping things on it’s head.
I rarely if ever read the comments, and I’ve never posted any before.
I still do enjoy all of your strips, as does probably the largest part of your anonymous readership. I see nothing to complain about. Please don’t get dragged down by some very vocal people who don’t like specific things.
They’re just jaded from the conclusion on1058
(odd didn’t allow me to post on my phone, the submit comment button was eaten by the comment box)
it does boil down to 3 things: your comic doesn’t have a set niche and it can lead to people who are looking for one type of strip getting a different type. character personality shifting. and you listening to the loud minority, rather then the silent majority.
You do cover a large range of topics ranging from drug use, religion, teenager’s lust, comedic arson, animal cruelty, animals being cruel to humans, animals being cruel to animals, femi-nazis, school girl lesbians, school girl sluts, the tragedy conga that is Luna’s backstory, so on and so on. all of the subjects you have covered means there are a lot of landmines all over the place. while most of your fans understand you acknowledge that pre/teen to teenagers are all walking balls of hormones, there are still ones wondering around he look back at themselves from their childhood and swear they were innocent till there college days. while you might not realize but there are a subgroup of conspiracy theorists (my father being in the camp), who suspect certain politicians and major corporations are doing secret assassinations to quiet criticism of their policies, Chase Morgan definitely is big enough to be associated with such.
I found the core memory one great and the last two meh. I can’t exactly say why, but it’s not that important. If you take risks in creating something, there will be great hits, but also some misses. I’ll gladly take the occational miss, as long as there are hits in between. I mean, what is the worst that can happen? We have one less chukle on a monday or thursday. What do we have to gain? I comic that sometimes makes us think, laugh, cry and some strips stay with us forever. I don’t think thats possible if you take it save all the time.
I think it might just be a popularity thing. As in, you have too many readers now, and that means you get some of the people with an overdone sense of entitlement and the attention span of a gnat. Short attention span means they’re easily put off (no loss there) and overdone sense of entitlement means they think they should complain about it first. Also, usually, that they have no idea how much effort goes in behind the scenes.
From what I hear tell, women in public life – particularly those advocating matters of gender equality – attract the most toxic of these wastes of oxygen. So while I’m sorry that the complainers bother you, I think it could be enormously worse …
I’m grateful for Sandra&Woo, and Gaia, and I’ve put my money where my mouth is in terms of Patreon and Kickstarter. I see one or two whingypusses per comic, although I don’t read every comment. You have how many thousands of readers? (Patreon indicates that a thousand people contribute, and that’s usually a minority of the audience.) The grizzlybubs are drawn from the full pool, they are not representative of just the ~50 commenters per comic.
Granted that newer visitors are unlikely to have been through the archives, and won’t realise what variety they’re likely to find here. So they might enjoy one sequence and be thrown by the next.
But there’s no way you’ll please all of the people all of the time. So write what you enjoy.
Honestly, I struggle with symbolism and allegory, so I think I just didn’t get what the two “news lion gets shot, turns out it was the carnivorous squirrel” strips were getting at or why they’d be funny.
@ Anon:
The 1052-1058 arc felt a whole lot to me like listening to someone tell an extremely long and intricate joke which culminates in an incredibly dull and unfunny punchline. I really enjoyed the entire concept of Larissa cutting peoples heads open and taking out memories. But instead of taking the story somewhere interesting, it ended with Paywall, which was nowhere near as clever or interesting as they thought it was.
There are times this comic is brilliant. There are times it is okay. There are times I am offended. I come for the brilliant. If I am occasionally offended, it is not enough for me to leave. Keep creating what you create and those who like it will continue to come. You will likely never please the ones who complain.
I didn’t really get the shtick with those last two, but whatevs. It feels weird saying this in the comments of a webcomic, but you can’t let internet comments influence your reality too much. It’s the ultimate echo chamber. If your overall traffic ever plummets, then yeah, okay, *maybe* you did something to alienate your readers…but given this particular comic, I imagine your readers are a pretty diverse bunch.
Keep doing your thing. Sometimes stuff might fall flat for some, or even a lot of readers. It happens. Just don’t let it weigh on your creative process. You’ve clearly got a really good thing going here.
As somebody who occasionally writes a critical comment (and then again a praising one): if you want to know which strip works and which won’t, it might be a good idea to show the sketch in advance to some honest friends. If they get it, if they like it, then chances are others will, too.
For example, I think most people did not like the “lion arc” one, but as a creator it’s probably impossible to know in advance, because you’re obviously in love with your ideas – and you have all the right to be!
Regarding content: you aim to strike a balance between Woo and Larissa and random other stuff. Over time the balance indeed shifted a bit away from Woo to Larissa (as you can see in your recent statistics) and some will love that others not. That’s understandable, but in general you strike the balance well, so just keep on going!
And about people who complain the quality goes down: forget about them as long as the number of readers doesn’t go down!
THANK YOU for all your work!!! 🙂
1052 is funny, 1061 is not. I had no idea what the joke even was in 1060 and I suspect the problem carried over to 1061. All I get is “Ruth thinks someone unselfishly helped her, but that someone actually had selfish motives” which is not funny. I’m not sure there’s more to say about it.
As far as worrying about it goes, what happens to the number of patreons is probably a better indicator than comments. If it goes down, there’s a problem. If it doesn’t, chance is the complaints aren’t substantial or that you get as many new readers as you lose over time.
You wonder why people receive late strips so badly? Well, here is answer from me: Paywall was a really bad way to end core memory arc. As a joke I would take it, if was followed by regular strip that continued arc, but as things are? Bleh.
For me peronally, it boils down to one thing: I really, really don’t like Ruth comics.
I don’t have to find each and every single strip interesting to like the comic in general and I can absolutely tolerate a strip I don’t get or just don’t find that funny every now and then.
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
… But I really friggin’ hate Ruth!
Yeah, 1060 and 1061, I don’t really understand, so that lessened my enjoyment. Additionally, I sympathize with the lion more, probably because I don’t see a reason not to. Also, wasn’t Ruth only going to kill old sick creatures?
@ Scratchpad:See previous comic. The lion was blowing his nose and taking medication.
If I may be a bit harsh, this can be interpret as either that how well a strip will be received is unpredictable or that you are poor at predicting how well a strip will be received. It’s a bit of both. On one hand, nobody can always predict how their audience will react. On the other hand, it possible to usually predict fairly well what will be liked and what won’t. You are apparently not capable of doing the latter.
You are a good writer, in particular, you are very good at writing dialog and setting the emotion for a scene, but frankly, I’ve noticed you don’t seem to handle reader feedback well. If something doesn’t make sense to you immediately, you are often too quick to go “I cannot make sense of this” or worse “this doesn’t make sense”, the latter of which implies the feedback doesn’t make sense rather than you lacking the ability to make sense of it.
That said, the statement that you can’t predict at all how well a strip will be received unless it’s obviously a spectacular one is of course true, just not maybe for the reason you think.
Dear Oliver, think about Uderzo:
The great Uderzo asked everytime he had some funny idea for his Asterix comics first his family. If they liked it: good. If they didn’t, even if he thought his idea was great, he scraped it, because they were typically right. – just do the same and you’ll become even better! 🙂
@ Talonos:
I saw that, but was he old?
I’d say the issue is Ruth and how you use her. I haven’t seen large amounts of negative comments in any other case.
The biggest problem is with how the violence is actually pictured when it comes to Ruth. Readers of the early days probably have less of an issue with her then new ones. We were slowly accustomed to the fact that some animals can die permanently in this comic.
Yet even for old ones she might be a bit to much. In almost all other cases of violence in S&W the readers are only confronted with the results. Be it mice excavated from their caves, Tweety being swallowed, or the resident predators performing a hustle. All we get in those strips are frightened rodents and then filled stomachs. The violent act of actually killing and eating the prey is not seen.
When we get violence against the main characters and their friends and families it can be bloody but it is always not deadly to them. It increases the tension in the scene and story arc but we can expect a happy end.
Ruth is the one exception where we have deadly and bloody violence in the act, even going as far picturing a victim being eaten alive. And always the sole reason for the violence is Ruth wanting to eat another predator. The joke is repetetive and, compared to the rest of the comic, unecessarily cruel.
I didn’t care much for 1060/1061 though you wouldn’t know from my comment – I don’t usually comment on perceived quality of comics (only doing it because I take this post as an invitation).
It’s been some time since the last proper story line (there have been shorter stories of a few strips each, of course, but I think the last longer form story was the contest between Sandra and Zoey).
One of those shorter stories was (partly, at least) about Ruth, who is, in my opinion, a very one-dimensional character – though there was a hint at some possibility for character development (earlier and even now). Another, of course, the Core Memory one which started great but ended in the rather lame paywall joke. Also some single joke strips, of course. While there were some great ones, others felt a lot like filler, among the latter ones was 1060. No context, no joke (unless you consider openly criminal activity by arguably borderline criminal organizations as a joke), just the broad statement that banking is broken (as, frankly, anyone with two brain cells to rub together already knows) – if there’s significant symbolism, it went right over my head. But okay, it’s just a filler, no big deal, no comment, better luck next time.
Around comes 1061 and the filler lion is linked to the main characters (but doesn’t fit at all), Ruth is back to her comedic psychopathy bordering on just psychopathy (yeah, I get it, it’s about reversal of predatory patterns but it’s really not a joke that works indefinitely and it certainly breaks down when animals don’t act like animals) and an the already lackluster joke of the previous strip is butchered for all it’s worth. It really starts to feel like you’re out of ideas.
On the bright side, 1062 looks like it could be the start of a main story line (a canon story, if you will). Is it? Yes? Maybe? Would be cool. Maybe another installment of Under A Killer Balloon? Or something a bit more serious? Holding my breath (not literally, of course).
Sounds normal. Both “Core memory mistake” and “Anonymous tip news” are fine. I don’t get the joke or point behind Tip, but I don’t have to. Another SaW strip will happen in a few days. To the readers, the biggest problem is the wait between strips. It lets them pick apart every facet of the last one while they wait for the next one. People need to be able to balance time between work and their hobbies. As in they should go spend more time on their hobbies!
I have no problem with either of them
I am a latecomer, having completed an archive binge recently. I don’t read any other comic which deals with 7th-graders in a fairly natural way, plus talking raccoons which can converse with human(s). For me that sort of sets a chalk line on the space the writer can cover.
I’m only posting this because, like the poster above, I take this thread as an invitation to comment.
I think if 1061/1062 had been presented as a single strip, i.e. skip the lion taking medicine and sneezing, add panel 1 of 1062, and compress 1062 panels 2-3 into 1 to conclude the strip, lots of people still wouldn’t have liked it, but they would mostly have just moved on. I admit that I found 1061 pretty incomprehensible. I kept looking for some meaning I was missing in the references to cold medicine and the somewhat odd wording of the lion’s opening remarks. I was a bit surprised that Ruth was the shooter, but it did more or less make sense of the first strip. Ruth as a character isn’t my favorite, but I know if I wait a few days there will be some other strip I might enjoy more.
As far as the storyline starting in 1052, it was sort of amusing, and I didn’t mind the “paywall” joke, but generally I find the sex-related jokes in S&W rather boring. Just not what I personally come here for. Again, I just wait a few days for something else to happen. 🙂 (Exception: Luna deciding she didn’t have to decide which boy she was interested in– that was a great twist! I think it worked as humor because it was surprising, yet plausible, and Larisa’s reaction was great.)
Again, I’m only commenting because I’m interpreting this thread as an invitation for suggestions. My advice: if you think an idea is “ok, maybe not great,” it might be better to just use it in 1 page, not stretch it out.
I don’t think it’s just those two strips. Personally, I didn’t even mind them all that much, though I didn’t like them either, but if I may try to interpret the reasons for the negative reception, I think it’s not entirely unlike some of the points made in this excellent video about the downfall of the Simpsons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk
I think that Sandra and Woo used to be a little more grounded, with more consistant characters. Yes, it’s always been cartoonish and about talking animals and all that, I know. But still amongst all that it felt like there’s a certain “baseline reality” to it, and the human characters, and even most of the animal ones, were actualy rather relatable. And even when stuff got very cartoony or unreal, we could always count on those qualities to keep the comic sort-of grounded. But I feel like that has been steadily changing, and more and more often the reality of the comic and the characters are just whatever the punchline needs it to be. And the recent comics are just a particularly egregious example of that. The “core memory” strip was a great little bit of comedy from those relatable, mostly-grounded characters. And then it devolved into some weird stuff with Larisa doing brain surgery, only to end with the “paywall” strip which was completely meta and had nothing to do with Sandra and Woo. And then it somehow devolved into two more obscure (at least for people who don’t know much about american politics which I assume it was about), not very funny strips set in some meta-dimension.
I’m sorry if any of this comes across as too harsh – I still genuinely enjoy S&W on the whole, and admire all the work that goes into it. I only write all this because, well, I assume that’s what this post is for.
You picked some pretty extreme examples, Novil. I find it hard to believe that if you thought about it for 15 seconds, you wouldn’t be able to figure out which of the two would be more popular.
Even if you haven’t seen or heard of Inside Out, the main gist of the joke in “Core Memory” is actually pretty universal. Just the expression on Cloud’s face is enough to sell it. There’s nothing else needed to get a laugh out of it. The only way you wouldn’t get it is if you’re an alien who doesn’t understand why humans try to shield their young from subjects of procreation.
“Anonymous Tip”, as far as I could tell, was supposed to be political. Unlike “The Fourth Circle Of Hell”, however, it didn’t give any context, nor did it have much of a punchline. At best, it was obscure and weak. It seems like it’s the kind of thing you only have a small chance of enjoying if you know exactly what the political topic is about, and 100% agree with the writer’s opinion.
So, if anything, “Anonymous Tip” should be compared to “The Fourth Circle Of Hell”, at least, and then the differences between the two, and how they make “The Fourth Circle Of Hell” successful, become obvious.
Others have have described the differences far better than I could between the strips you chose, but I think I would like to add that maybe a problem besides the occasional unfunny strips is maybe that the level of cynicism/skepticism has been a little too high.
Case in point the most recent strips that don’t reek of hammering in how life is Hell and all people are scum are a mere two from last year:
– http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2018/10/01/1026-good-pets/
– http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2018/10/15/1030-dating-tips-for-boys-part-4-of-4/ (Even then, the three before this one was negative stereotype after negative stereotype of girls in contrast to Larissa’s dating advise which wasn’t full of guy bashing)
Heck to look at a strip which some might have still been turned off by, I look at the series of strips showing us Landon’s parents. Even with Harriet being very annoying/hateful we still get some positivity in the form of:
– Larissa making a genuine effort to give a good impression on her boyfriend’s mom.
– Edward being a reasonable/friendly person.
– Zoey & Michelle showing concern for Landon & Larissa not being allowed to be together to the point that Michelle tricks Harriet into budging on her decision. Incidentally, we see through this appearance that her learning of Zoey’s feelings from their previous appearance didn’t deter their friendship.
Just saying that hammering in cynicism/negativity more often can breed negativity from your readers.