Just a quick little retrospective to mark the changing of the seasons, as it were.
Annie Forever ended on September 2nd, 2024, after 82 unmissed daily updates. That’s a pretty good score for me these days. All strips are and will continue to be available online for as long as possible, but they’re also available in the form of a neat little packaged PDF/CBZ ebook that you can buy for €5 on Gumroad whenever you want, to keep forever, even if syndicate lawyers get mad at me even though Annie is in the public domain and I’m definitely allowed to do this. Oodles of bonus features include commentary on every strip, analysis, some insight into the origin of the Knife and Dime, and into my process.
Here are some things I learned doing Annie Forever.
- This is the first webcomics project I’ve started and finished exactly according to plan in my adult life. Everything else has just sort of fizzled out, even things that ran for hundreds of strips. Turns out: It feels very good to actually finish something, and that’s a high I would like to keep chasing.
- Updating regularly was, honestly, really good for my brain. Getting up at 7am to move the image and the newspost to the right folder first thing every morning isn’t a huge activity, but it fully activated me every morning in a way nothing else does.
- Several readers indicated that they felt like they were missing something not being familiar with the original comic strip. I assumed a slightly broader reader familiarity with Annie from other media, and part of my style at this point, I think, is to imply a wider world, a bigger story, which I do in Annie Forever by suggesting a bad bridge-burning occurred between Annie and Oliver Warbucks some time before Annie Forever, and I also failed to communicate that it was meant to feel like you’ve just… started reading and keeping up with a strip in the newspaper one day, with no meaningful way to read anything back.
Anyway, I trust my readers can generally keep up, and if they trust me as a cartoonist at all, I hope they trust I’ll tell them about additional context they might want or need. - My comics production speed was always just under seven strips a week. I could easily produce two or, on a good day, even three black-and-white strips, but then life would get in the way and/or the full-colour Sunday strip would slow me down again. With time I could’ve got to a good point with that, but if I’m ever gonna do this kind of daily schedule again, I’d probably have to make a change somewhere — no Sunday, black-and-white Sunday, maybe hire a colourist for the Sunday, something would have to change about the Sunday. But my next project is pages instead of strips, probably two a week at first, so the point is moot for now, anyway.
- That next project will not be Annie Forever, but I deliberately called the book “volume one” and I do now know what happens to Annie next. Annie WILL return.
I’ve had almost a month off now, and I miss updating regularly a lot, so I’ll just say: We’re closer to new comics than we are to Annie Forever ending.