Comic strip archive reformat

When I first started Hermit Hill I was drawing the strip in a full page format, typically with 9 panels. My goal with that was always moving it to print and making them comic book collections. I've put out two issues with this format and I think it worked fine.

At a certain point, however, I realized this is not a great format for reading comics on the web. A reader had to scroll to see the whole comic, which I think is bad design. You should be able to see the whole comic page at once. This was most obvious to me with the comics that played around with panel layout. The effect of those pages are lost when you have to scroll to see the bottom. So, I changed the format of Hermit Hill to a traditional comic strip format.

Since making the change I've been much happier with the strip format, but it has always bothered me that I had about 30 pages at the front of my archive with the 9 panel, full page format. I notice in my site logs that a new reader will often come to my site, click "back" a few times to see some previous strips and then jump to the first Hermit Hill page to start reading from the beginning. This always made me cringe at the thought of this new reader suddenly being confronted with that web unfriendly format.

I have spent the last couple months reformatting those comics to match the strip dimensions. For some I was able to split out the 3 rows of panels into 3 separate strips and have them each still work on their own. For others I had to drop a panel and reformat the page into two rows of 4 panels, which still worked without having to scroll. A handful of pages just couldn't be rearranged, so I've dropped them from the web archive. I will include those as print exclusive comics in the upcoming book collection.

It was tedious, time consuming work that took me a few months to find the time, but now it is complete. My full archive now matches the correct strip format and I am much happier. I no longer cringe at the thought of folks starting from the beginning of Hermit Hill. There was one drawback from doing this, the numbering of my strips had to change. I ended up with about 20 new individual strips. This is only a problem for my older blog posts that point to specific comic strips. The link to those older strips will direct to different ones. I may go back through all my blog posts to update them, but that will have to be another project for another time.