From 5 September 2013 to 1 May 2014, the following eight polls ran on Sandra and Woo. All but one of them got over 2,000 votes and it’s time to present the results.

Poll from 5 September 2013:

Although many casual readers may not have participated in the poll, those are some great numbers with 50% of our readers placing Sandra and Woo in their personal top 3 of all comics they read.

Poll from 5 September 2013:

Compared to the same poll from 10 December 2011, the number of Sandra and Woo readers who also read Gaia has decreased by 3%. That’s not a drop that I’d find alarming.

Poll from 5 September 2013:

Compared to the same poll from 6 April 2010, the most notable change is the significant drop of people who particularly enjoy reading comics featuring animals. In contrast, more people are fond of fantasy and action comics. I suspect that many of them first found Gaia and then started to read Sandra and Woo as well. School comics are still surprisingly unpopular.

Poll from 5 September 2013:

The readership is dominated by readers who found Sandra and Woo just recently. I wonder why so few of the people who joint us in 2009 are still sticking around.

Poll from 24 November 2013:

Compared to the same poll from 4 September 2010, Larisa’s popularity has grown massively, in expense of Woo’s. I’m a little sad that my favorite character Sandra is once again on the last position. Because I think that girl really ties the comic together. 😉

Poll from 24 November 2013:

Compared to the same poll from 13 November 2009, longer story arcs have become even more popular. I’m a bit puzzled by that since single strips usually get more comments and page views than strips that are part of a story arc.

Poll from 24 November 2013:

It’s official: Sandra and Woo readers are hardcore gamers who play at least one new game per week! Only 17%, including me, are filthy casuals who only play a few games per year. 😉

Poll from 24 November 2013:

Yeah, I’m not surprised. Zoey x Michelle was our most popular story arc so far, there’s no doubt about it. My personal favorite was Woo’s first meeting with Seeoahtlahmakaskay. I still have to use copy&paste for her name all the time. 😉

Something funny I found on my hard drive from the time when the best rated comments were shown in the right sidebar.

Some time ago, I found Larisa’s favorite book. Thanks to our reader Ken_g6, I now also found Woo’s favorite book:

Unfortunately, I could not find any more information about it.

Most of you will remember our strip #500, The Book of Woo. We created four illustrated pages, inspired by the Voynich manuscript, which show strange illustrations next to a cipher text. Despite the big effort of some of our readers, the cipher text has not yet been deciphered. The comment section of the strip contains almost 400 comments with more or less valuable information for anybody who is interested in the challenge.

However, thanks to our reader Foogod, there is now a much better place to find concise information about the Book of Woo, the Book of Woo Wiki! At the moment, you can find pages about the following topics there:

• Transliterations
• Facts about the encrypted text
• Analytical results
• Theories about the encrypted text
• Artwork interpretation
• Links and resources

Foogod also created a computer font that can be used to write all the glyphs found in the Book of Woo. The font looks really good in my opinion and it could also be used for magic formulas or other things like that. Click here to download the Book of Woo font WooGlyph Sans!

If you have a look at the Wiki page for theories about the encrypted text, you will see that there is strong evidence that the character which looks like “Z”, and the corresponding character which looks like “~”, is some kind of space/suffix marker/dash character instead of a regular letter. This would reduce the relevant alphabet to 14 letters, plus the special “oPo” character.

I have decided to give you a little hint. The following word appears in the plain text:

ENGLISH: Potbelly Hill | GERMAN: Bauchigen Hügel

That means if the plain text is in English, the word is “Potbelly Hill”, if the plain text is in German, the word is “Bauchigen Hügel”, if the plain text is a mixture of English and German, the word is “Potbelly Hill” or “Bauchigen Hügel”. It should be quite easy to determine on which page. I hope this will generate some debate about the supposed content of that page.

I have also decided to send Satsuoni a poster package for providing the first decryption step and further significant contributions to the discussion. I will also send Foogod a poster package for setting up the Book of Woo Wiki and creating the Book of Woo font. Don’t forget that I will pay the person who is able to provide a decipherment that’s sufficiently close to the plain text a reward of $300. Send your decipherment attempt(s) to novil@gmx.de.

It’s time! Time for the top 12 of the Sandra and Woo and Gaia fanart contest 2014! If you haven’t done it already, also don’t forget to check out the submissions placed between position #13 and #25 and all the other submissions we received.

The submissions are ordered from place 12 to 1. Please show your support by visiting the artists’ websites and/or by writing a comment in the comment section of this blog post!

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