Monday, March 10, 2008

Scheduling and Timeliness

I was just made aware of Kurtz' Twitter feed, and, while I haven't been following it, I grabbed this out of a comment left here:

pvponline: "Seriously considering moving to 5 days a week on the 10 year anniversary. I figure 10 years has earned me my weekends. Not sure though"


I would wholeheartedly support this, and so would many other fans, I bet.

While I (obviously) feel free to make my opinions known about the writing and art and almost anything else about the strips, how and when he puts them out is his business. I'm not one to complain if a strip is late or doesn't show up -- I don't know what's going on in the real world that drives his output, and it's not my business.

I'm sure there are business decisions driving how often a comic is updated, and, to have continued his 7-days-a-week effort for so long, Scott has had strong ones I'd guess (the Image books?). But if it's time for a change, don't hesitate, Scott. It's your business.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

But for the last several weeks Scott updates the weekends strips on Monday, so there`s not big difference anyway

Anonymous said...

It gets my vote, I really hope Scott seriously considers this.

It'll give him more time for other projects and maybe he can start a family. He's great with kids :D

sinnick said...

Plus, it's a well-documented fact that having time off re-energizes you and makes you more efficient. Perhaps having his weekends would give the strip a much-needed boost of creativity.

Anonymous said...

Are you all out of your minds? This isn't going to help anything at all, just as his abandoning color didn't help his timeliness!

Scott can't maintain a stock of strips in advance. He's too lazy and too diverted by other activities that he DOES do on time such as the image books and his Ding strips.

All this is going to do is allow him to be even lazier, and you'll still see strips posted late. Hell, it's Tuesday, and Sunday's strip was posted Monday, and Monday's still isn't up.

This isn't going to solve anything at all.

Scott said...

I greatly appreciate the support guys!

Brett Schiller (Sage) said...

Yeah, we all get weekends. Scott does 7 strips (2 Ding, 5 PVP) plus books, comicons, animated features and sticks a lot of post its on babys :).

Go and relax, as long as he says he wont do weekends, so I wont look for them every time Im on, I say why the hell not?

evan said...

I would not mind if he cut out the weekends, but I have very little hope that it would result in the strip being on time. Yes, it would be less work, but in my opinion he would compensate for that by procrastinating more.

His "method" for writing strips is to procrastinate and hope a brilliant idea hits him at the 11th hour. Cutting down the work load just ups the amount of time to wait until it's the 11th hour.

This is all speaking as a fellow procrastinator, myself. The only way that we will ever have consistently on time PvP is if Scott decides he's going to plan out his stories in advance (which I really, really, think he needs to do anyway so that storylines can be cohesive and complete) so that he can build himself a buffer. This I don't think he'll ever do this, because he's tricked himself into believing his way is right. "I do my best work at the last minute when the pressure's really on" That really is not true. You do all of your work at the last minute, so yes... the best is included in that as well.

This waiting until the day the strip is supposed to be up before beginning work on it (presumably) is nonsense. It's really unprofessional. The method for writing and creating the strips described above is, likewise, unprofessional. The professional Web Cartoonist should have at least two weeks of strips written, at the very least--if not at least two weeks of strips completed--at all times. That way things like weekends can't take you by surprise and throw you off schedule. (I was doing well... but then this weekend came along out of the blue and so I fell behind again....)

The Wax Lion said...

Did he ever say cutting weekends was intended to address the issue of late strips? Or are they unrelated?

I don't see any reason for Scott not to drop weekends--but he might take a leaf from Pete Abrams and get a guest artist in on those days. I've never minded that Sluggy's weekends weren't regular strips, because I've found new cool artists this way (Erika Henderson rocks) and Pete's Sunday sketches and no-content cartoons are still a reason to check the site every day.

In contrast, Jeph Jacques doesn't do weekend strips and it's never bothered me--but I might point out he also does a full-color, 4 to 8 panel comic which updates before midnight every night of the week...

Scott, do what works for you--but if you're concerned about your hit counts, give serious thought to a weekend guest artist.

Paul T. said...

I can't believe this... After all of the crap I've taken over the past few years for complaining that Scott is always late, he announces that he's going to drop weekends and all of a sudden, everyone agrees with me!

I really did have hope, some years ago, that Scott would get ahead on the strips and he would get them posted on time. There was some comic book show where he and a few other artists had a contest to see how many strips they could draw in 24 hours... I thought to myself, "GREAT!!! Scott will be 20 some odd days ahead and the strips will be on time!" All it did was give Scott 20 some odd days to goof off and get behind again...

As I have said many times before... I wish I didn't like PvP so much... The constant lateness of the strip, combined with the diminishing quality of the storylines really make it hard to keep it on my RSS list... But I LIKE the strip... I keep reading it because I LIKE the strip...

But Scott... Read this and take notice... I'm getting really tired of reading Sunday's strip on Tuesday, and of the lameness of the so-called plot... And from the posts on this blag, I'm not the only one. You have an audience to attend to... You need to decide what you want to do... What you want to focus on... And stick to that... You have obviously stretched yourself too thin, or have found other interests to occupy you... PvP is lacking in quality and you're the only one who can change that.

Flame on if you want, or man up and admit we have valid points and either address them, or just drop PvP and go on to whatever else it is that interests you...

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