So Swankpuppy was an odd experiment. Basically it was started as a sort of melding of the old OMGJ with a focus on short 3 panel comics. The idea being that doing those simple comics would be a solid way to update regularly, as making those things would be totally easy, right?

Wrong.

Webcomics are not that easy to make. Even the ones I was doing that basically consisted of the same damn MS Paint picture over and over. I quickly found out that I can’t make those damn comics every other day, and Amanda was having real life issues, so the thing we built the site around was basically crippled from there. The secondary stuff – the articles – weren’t beefy enough to carry the site, and were often just thrown up as space filler until someone decided to make another comic. It was just not working.

So lesson learned: Do not focus your site’s main attention on something you can barely create. I suppose that’s why as much as I always wanted to focus OMGJ around Amanda’s comics, there was just no way it would ever be possible thanks to their erratic schedule. I figured cropping them down to 3 panels would get things cranking faster, but it came at the cost of quality. Amanda seems to need several pages of space to make what we all consider her best comics, and 3 panels just didn’t cut it.

After a couple of months, Swankpuppy went stillborn, and that was that. Amanda had vanished, and me and Mark moved on to Gameheck, which is going quite well. Being able to actually provide content for your site is a pretty simple rule for having a website, but sometimes it isn’t so obvious when you’re excited to start something new.