And so Eric I of Drostardy fulfills his destiny and is free to go and be with his family and friends again. I thought this a fitting way to celebrate strip # 3400!! That’s a LOT OF YAFGC!!!
-Rich “BK” Morris
The New Crest of the Drostardy and Elegrost Alliance.
EDIT
Hello YAFGC family!
So… I recently RE-stumbled upon a webcomic. A webcomic that had been one of a cluster of webcomics which were the inspiration to get me working on my own back in 2006. In fact, those are the comics referred to in the title of YAFGC. I started doing an archive binge on the old webcomic -delighted to see that it too was still going. But then I found a link to a review of it. It was a bad review. I didn’t entirely agree with the criticisms, but there were a few points it made that I couldn’t disagree with and which tainted my view of the comic… and by extension, the artist/writer from then on.

Primarily apart from accusations of being sexist and racist, they were also slammed for being sensitive to criticism and shutting down and blocking anyone who ever said anything critical about their webcomic.

It made me think of my own webcomic and my own online persona. Like…. YAFGC in all this time has never gotten high profile enough to make it to big webcomic review sites like that one. Oh there are a few online reviews, most dating back to 2011 or earlier. But it’s never been one of the top listed. My own fault, of course, I’m not attempting a career at it, I do it for my entertainment primarily, yours secondarily, and as a source of income only as inspired by you guys asking if would accept your gifts. So no, I never promoted it like a business. Nothing I can complain about there.

However…. my experience in public critiques of YAFGC have mostly been:
1) Glowing praise for my art (!?) and my storytelling ability (!!?). Two characteristics /not/ shared by any professional animation studio I’ve ever worked at since 1992.

2) Pointing out -quite rightly- that I’m a crappy editor and make a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes. (Fun fact: I’ve had an editor ditch me for ‘reacting badly’ to correction. Something I was not aware I had done, or at least done in a way to be overly offensive. We have reconciled since, but they won’t edit my stuff again.)

I have had one or two comments about my artistic or storytelling choices from particularly forward readers who are also old friends and are comfortable telling me such things, and I’ve agreed with their comments and (I hope) will take such commentary forward with me to learn from it.

I have only ever banned two people from the comments section of YAFGC and both times it was because they were general asshats who loved stirring up trouble in the threads and reacted badly to being asked to stop.

So what I’m saying is…. are people just telling me the good stuff and are afraid to share the bad stuff? What can I do to make YAFGC a better experience?