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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 in August 2009 I relaunched the strip.
However, I didn't get as much prepared before the relaunch as I intended. I didn't get the autoupdate script working—I had to update everything by hand—I didn't replace the fonts as I intended,
and I didn't get many of the missing pages done. 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.
This was a mistake. I should have waited till I was ready. So, when my buffer ran out in May 2010, I
reluctantly decided to put the strip on hiatus and re-relaunch it in August 2010, on the ten-year
anniversary of its initial launch. So I did. Unfortunately, I still don't have quite as much done
as I'd like—in particular, I still haven't finished the replacement font—but I'm way ahead of
where I was in August 2009. This time the strip will continue indefinitely... or at least until it reaches the end (which, if things go as I plan, should be many years from now).
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 2010 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 Fridays (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...
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