Soup - The Comic Strip
by Alun Clewe


Soup is a fantasy strip centering on one Erlak, god of soup, and his mortal champion. It was originally launched back in August 2000 as a daily strip. It didn't stay daily for long, unfortunately, and underwent a number of periods of weekly or semiweekly updates and outright hiatuses, until near the end of 2007 I was broke enough that I fell behind in my hosting bills and the entire site was wiped. Fortunately, of course, I still had local copies of pretty much everything, so I've now finally relaunched the strip.

There were a number of things I had hoped to do before the relaunch that, unfortunately, I haven't yet gotten around to. One is making sure everything in the site is working; as it stands there are a lot of missing pages. (Not comic pages, but extra pages like the Cast page, the Links page, and so forth.) Yes, I know that, and I'm working on it. Also, I'd really hoped to redo the fonts used in the strips. Yes, I know the current fonts are hard to read (especially the one used for Drv'dxx's dialogue), and I fully intend to replace them with more legible fonts. Haven't gotten to that yet either, though, but I will, and I'll update all the strips accordingly when I do. As I said, I'd hoped to get all this done before the relaunch... but I didn't want to delay the relaunch any further, because I wanted the strips to land on the same months and days as they'd originally run, and since the strip had originally launched on August 20, 2000, that meant if I didn't relaunch it on August 20, 2009, I'd have to wait till August 20, 2010.

The fact that this is a relaunch of a strip that originally started in 2000 has a number of consequences. Most notably, it means that, since the days of 2009 don't fall on the same days of the week as those of 2000, the big color strips that were originally on Sundays now fall on Thursdays (and may eventually change to another day due to leap years). While admittedly kind of odd, that's not really a problem, though; after all, Soup isn't running in a newspaper where the strip size matters. On the plus side, the fact that it's a relaunch of a strip that had already been running for a long time means I have a good nine months of strips already done (except for the aforementioned font replacement), which means that this time the strip is going to remain daily for at least that long...

I haven't made any attempts to publicize the strip since the relaunch, or announced its relaunch anywhere except to people I know and in forms like Facebook status updates. Once I've got the whole site working again, and once I've gotten to the strips where the art isn't quite so embarrassingly bad, then maybe I'll do some advertising and try to drum up some readership. For the moment, however, if you're reading this, you are probably one of a very small number of people who know about it...


E-mail the cartoonist: alun@soupcomic.com.