A very early draft of the 101st Sandra and Woo strip

Dear Powree,

I really appreciate that you’re always posting drafts of new strips in our internal forum so that I can check in time if something needs to be corrected. But don’t you think that, maybe, you were still a little bit too early in your creative process when you posted the following sketch of our 101st strip? Of course I’m lacking your artistic imagination, but I think nobody can point with his fingers at me for not being able to form an informed opinion about the poses and facial expressions of the characters…

Of course there is a minimal chance that you might just have uploaded the wrong image file, but since that wouldn’t be funny I’ll just discard that option. 😉

Yours sincerely,

Novil

I have watched Up! in the cinema today (it has just started in Germany) and it has instantly become my most favorite movie, surpassing The Matrix and Over the Hedge. I have never seen a movie that moved me that much while still being full of funny scenes and dramatic action. Of course, the young kids in the theatre were amused by the slapstick scenes with the giant bird Kevin and the dog Dug. But they lacked the life experience to see the beauty in the heartrending scenes with Carl and his former wife Ellie and were rather confused by them instead. Nevertheless it was interesting to experience their carefree laughter at the next funny scene while still having a tear in the eye after the slideshow of Carl and Ellie’s life.

If you think about it, the movie does not offer a happy ending in the strict meaning of the word. You can regret many things in life, but you only have so much power over all the things that happen in your life and so you might never get the chance to achieve the goal you desire the most. Carl only achieved the main goal of his (and Ellie’s) life after the death of his beloved wife. And when he finally did he had to find out that it was, after all, a goal whose achievement bore no meaning in itself. The moment of his biggest triumph was also the moment of one of his biggest letdowns. “The journey (of life) is the reward.” Is that the main statement of the movie? I don’t really know. I just know that in moments like these life seems quite cruel as physical reality can supposably never satisfy the demands of the mind. I seriously wonder if man has gotten too intelligent too fast; the mind in paradise, the body still on earth.

What bothers me the most is how recklessly people are throwing away love. I don’t necessarily mean the love between lovers, but also the love towards your children or the love between best friends. The father of Russel who didn’t show up during the Wilderness Explorer award show at the end of the movie is a good example for this. Being successful at work can certainly be a rewarding experience, but no soul has yet experienced salvation because some arrows are pointing upwards. It’s usually not needed to turn everything upside down to make the world a slightly better place. For example by helping your clumsy sister when she messed up something again instead of making fun of her.

I dunno, just some random thoughts of a troubled mind.

I think I have now drawn enough strips for the time being to make my points about certain political topics (except one that will be published on Halloween). So in the following months you can expect to see more comics dealing with the inner life of my characters. The current story arc is an example for this.

I thought it would be welcome if the updates delivered by RSS would have the same dimension as the strips on the website (980 pixel) instead of just 380 pixel. However, the “reach” of the last two strips put online dropped by other a third.

So I’d like to ask you what resolution I should use in the future. I must confess that I do not have a deeper understanding of RSS.

Update: I want to add that it was technically not possible to deliver 980 pixel wide comics in the RSS feed before the last website update.

Update #2: Okay, I’ll leave it at 980 pixel which seems to be favored by most. No need for further comments at this point.

Visitors can now rate the comments of other readers. At the moment, comments with 3 or more down votes are hidden by default (unless they have at least 5 up votes), and comments with 4 or more up votes are highlighted. I might change those numbers in the future, just as well as the general behavior of the comic rating plugin might change since it’s still in an early stage of its development cycle. I’m confident that dumb comments will get voted down rather quickly so that they will get less attention.

The RSS feed should now deliver new comics in full size (980 pixel) to subscribers. I had to manually alter the PHP code of the ComicPress Manager plugin since it didn’t generate the RSS comic files (and those seen in the search results) at all after the last update *sigh*.

Sandra and Woo is looking for guest strips which shall be put on our website one week before the publication of the 100th Sandra and Woo strip in the first week of October.

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