499 Sandra and Woo strips have been published since 19 October 2008. Since the 500th strip is not yet finished, I compiled a list of my top 20 Sandra and Woo strips so far to shorten the waiting time. I excluded [0498] The Return Of The Empress from the list because that one should be still very fresh in the memory of all readers. I will post my personal top 10 on Wednesday or Thursday.

20. [0430] Software Engineering, Now With Cats!

This is the only Sandra and Woo strip which has been posted on a large number of other websites. I already thought that it will become more popular than a normal Sandra and Woo strip, but I didn’t expect such a spike of interest. The number of daily visitors on our website almost doubled on 19 November 2012 and again on 29 November 2012. I think our version of the famous “Swings” cartoon wouldn’t have worked half as well without the funny last panel.

19. [0024] Wildlife Feeding

Bill’s father was inspired by the German raccoon expert and photographer Ingo Bartussek. He’s against feeding wildlife. Shadow, obviously, disagrees with this sentiment. While the first five panels are certainly funny, they also show very well how hard life can be for wild animals. I think this strip has a similar vibe as many Dreamworks Animation movies.

18. [0342] The Maretrix

An anonymous imageboard user came up with a ponyfied version of Mr. Smith’s dialog during his final confrontation with Neo. I really liked the idea, but I also thought that his adaption was still too similar to the original dialog. Therefore, I made several additional changes to it, for example by changing Mr. Smith’s questions to “Is it apple pie? Or a lovely dress? Could it be for good weather?”

17. [0090] The Hunting Methods Of Procyon Lotor

It’s a rather obvious joke, that maybe has been done before, but it shows the characters of raccoons extremely well. They’re opportunistic omnivores who don’t bother to go on exhausting hunts.

16. [0042] Weird Animals

Here is another strip from the early days of Sandra and Woo. Powree’s ability to draw amazingly funny faces reached its first climax here. I also love the other raccoon’s “GULP” in the fourth panel. Sometimes a single word can make the difference between a good and a great comic. Having Sandra and Woo go to a meeting of exotic pet owners was probably a bit early after just 40 strips, but my idea document for possible storylines was almost empty at that time.

15. [0035] Reliable Sources

Sandra and Woo is probably the webcomic with the second most Wikipedia related jokes after XKCD. This was the first one. I have written several articles for the German and English Wikipedia, especially the featured article about the raccoon. So I just had to make a comic with a few citation numbers [1][2] in a word bubble.

14. [0322] Sandra’s Scream

This is the first of several art related comics in my top 20 list. “The Scream” by Edvard Munch is one of my favorite paintings, along with his less popular, but very impressive painting “The Sun”. Powree drew two slightly different versions of the first panel. I spent some time to mix them together by using the left side of version 1 and the right side of version 2.

13. [0201] Eating Out

This comic is semi-autobiographical as some of you might have guessed. Just like Ye Thuza, my mom transformed into the dangerous saber-toothed squirrel during a restaurant visit. The last panel would just not have been complete without Yuna hiding behind the menu. The last panel also proved to work very well as an advertising banner, especially on gaming sites.

12. [0329] Outside The Box

“It’s so meta, even their attitude.” I tinkered with the basic concept for this strip for several months, but I wasn’t able to come up with a fitting last panel for the sled ride. I had several ideas, but none of them was good enough in my eyes. Then I had the idea to leave the last panel empty and add the additional panel you can see above. I asked Powree to draw Larisa’s comic in a different style to make it look distinct from the usual artwork. The bear is from the almost unknown webcomic Bear and Tiger. Since Larisa is from Russia, I wanted to use a brown bear as her companion. So Bear and Tiger was the best choice since the comic’s setting is even located in Russia.

11. [0454] Underground Artist

The flow of the dialog is just perfect in this comic in my opinion. I particularly like Sandra’s sarcastic remark “Interesting choice of words” in the second panel. I played around with several phrases for Larisa’s dialog in the third panel. The description of the last panel in the comic script was quite complicated, but Powree got it right immediately. The smiley on the ice cube was Powree’s idea, by the way.