back again

After taking what essentially amounts to a year off from the strip, I have dug back into it with abandon. It's amazing how much I have missed the daily work as well as the characters themselves. I am also working on putting together hard copy formats of the web strips to be available in book form.
It is odd, though, how what works well in a strip does not necessarily do so in longer format even though the stories are relatively contiguous. I find that I have sacrificed a bit of the narrative flow to make each episode funny and to allow it to stand on its own. For example, here's an original strip as it appeared in web form:
... and here's how it turns out when broken up for print:
As you see, the panel with the joke is now on the middle of the page. I may need to rework the dialogue or (shudder) recut the strip to fit each strip onto its own page.

These are things I wish I had thought of before I chose a format. One thing about web comics is that you can really do whatever you like as far as page length, but it's a two-edge sword. I also was much more adventurous in my print comic days: