Week 269! (Page 425 Finished) (Patreon)

THIS MARKS PAYMENT FOR THE WEEK OF 9/29-10/5.

OKAY, WELL, here's page 425 finally finished after yet another month delay, which I deeply apologize for. Got it done in time for this month and it'll go up on the site on the 5th of November.

I want to go into length on something particular about this page's development that required some mild research and heavy searching for a method to accomplish, but firstly, to touch on the contents of the page itself, which is obviously calling back to the events of the last third of the 16th arc. Y'know, where Kale and co. were in Campy's "dream" and some weird spooky stuff happened! This is establishing that Kale does remember, to some extent, some amount of the stuff that went on in there, while Campy seemingly doesn't at all, or at least isn't aware he does. Recall that the events of arc 16 happened last night in-universe, so this is fresh on Kale's mind, and Campy getting upset about writing in his notebook when he woke up at the start of this arc is a direct follow-up to it. It actually doesn't really have anything to do with this arc specifically, it's just tying all the events together, establishing that they happened to whatever extent. This page also further bluntly hints that this arc is taking place on the same day as the previous arc with Bruce, as both Kale and this maned wolf character that walks by are wearing the same clothes they were then.

Alright, so, you may have noticed I attached a SWF file to this update post, and that's because this comic is supposed to actually be animated! If you saw the sketch preview update last month or the script update for this page a long time ago, you'd know that the seventh panel is meant to very quickly show flashbacks to events from the 16th arc during Campy's "dream". Now, I wanted this page to not be a SWF by default like past animated comics for two reasons: A) Flash in browsers is dying next year (which is going to kill some pages from the past actually, I'll have to deal with that eventually), and B) I wanted the fact this page was animated to be hidden, and as SWFs need to load and load differently compared to an image, it would be obvious that an animation happens when they see it.

The usual obvious choice is a GIF, but also what's well-known is the very limited 256 color palette a GIF is allowed to have at maximum, meaning any animated GIF I attempted to export resulted in heavy dithering, blurring, off colors, and other associated issues no matter what I did, so it wasn't going to work. I made the SWF version that I attached to this update to try and work with it, converting it to video formats like MOV, AVI, and MP4 to try and see if I could flirt with an HTML5 system or something I guess, but no conversions from SWF to video formats ever worked right, omitting dialogue balloons (somehow), colors, and/or frame delays every time, so those also were out.

Finally, in this modern day and age, I was aware that formats like APNG and WEBP exist now, animated image formats that have far fewer restrictions compared to regular GIFs. However, I didn't know at all how to make them, so it took a fair amount of delving into search results and testing a bunch of converters and such. For a while it was to no avail, until finally I stumbled on a little program that took image sequences and constructed an APNG out of them in the same way an online converter would, although any online browser one failed. This download did work, though, and what resulted was the PNG file attached to this very update! Its file extension is still just .png, but it does indeed animate like a GIF would! Which is very exciting to have figured out, because not only does this completely solve the "readers won't immediately realize it's animated" issue, but it could help in the future when dealing with the aforementioned Flash-is-dying-soon issue.

So yeah, I attached the SWF version, as I'm not sure if Patreon will "play" the APNG like it would just be opened on its own. It should play on its own once uploaded and on the site itself... in almost all browsers, anyway. The one flaw of APNG (and other non-GIF animated image formats) is that not every single browser in the universe supports APNGs, but the vast majority of them do at least. Using an incompatible browser just means it treats the file like a normal non-animated PNG, so it's not the worst, but those people would miss out.