Week 235! (Patreon)

THIS MARKS PAYMENT FOR THE WEEK OF 2/3-2/9.

Well, February being the short month, I only was able to get the sketch done for the next page rather than the lineart or anything beyond. Still, preview of the next page, 419, which launches the next story arc about Campy and Connor.

As per usual I won't say my whole piece on this page yet until the final version is up, but I will say that you might notice something: the page is bigger! Surprise! From this page onward, I'm increasing the size of each page and panel, from the former page width of 705px to a width of 885px. That may not seem like a whole lot from the numbers alone, but comparing the previous page and this page, especially when they'll both be up on the site, will really reflect how much of a difference it actually is. I've wanted to do this for quite a while actually, as not only have I been struggling for some time to fit lengthier word balloons into the comparatively smaller and more cramped space in the old-size panels, but screen resolutions have also overall increased and more people are using bigger resolutions since I first adopted the sizes I've been using up until now ten years ago. Increasing the size of the panels and pages also puts them more in-line with the sizes used by many similarly-formatted webcomics today: TwoKinds pages are 825px wide, Housepets pages are 878px, Slightly Damned pages are 900px, and Order of the Black Dog pages are 956px. 885px seemed like a good middle ground in that sense. After some quick tests, the bigger pages also become much easier to read by default without zooming on mobile, which has obviously become pretty important nowadays. All these factors have culminated in this change I've finally followed through on after a decade of using the same smaller-sized template for every page.

Now, the FH site was precisely formatted to fit the 705px pages, and making them bigger like this will break some things if I left it as is. So, I'll be making some temporary minor changes to the layout in order to fit these new pages in while not being forced to overhaul the site completely yet (a site overhaul has been something that's been needing done for a while now for multiple reasons even unrelated to the increased comic size). Mainly, I'll be shoving all the stuff on the left sidebar section (the Patreon button and Facebook box) into the right sidebar section, since with the loss of Project Wonderful ads, there's no real need to have two sidebars for two different spaces for ads anyway. The site will lose its intentionally-centered focus for the pages, but I don't think that's actually much of a problem for many considering some other popular webcomic site layouts like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal's or TwoKind's. Maybe in the overhaul I'll make it centered completely again and get rid of sidebars entirely, but I haven't thought too much about it yet. In any case, the reduction to one sidebar will give enough space to the new bigger pages while still having the site fit on 1280px wide resolutions.

So yeah, bigger pages! Long time I've been wanting to do this, and hopefully it'll be easier to read, easier to draw more things in higher detail, easier to fit word balloons in, etc. etc. etc. And hopefully the finalized version of this page will be done by the projected date of March 5th!