Friday the 13th, Part 1

Originally published 13 August 2010

The first of the Friday 13th gags, where something different is deliberately done wrong to the strip each time. This was a fairly simple deliberate mistake, with the panels placed in the order 3 - 2 - 4 - 1. Later versions would involve image inversions, PhotoShop filters and even animations…

Do not adjust your set

One of my series of Friday 13th mindwibbles. This is actually the strip from the last Friday 13th (the one where they're dogs in the last frame) put through a motion blur filter, in order to end up with the 'put through a blender' effect you see here. I wonder if anyone will notice that Smith is a dog in the last frame....

Friday 13th Part 2

I always like to do something a bit strange on Friday 13th, whenever it comes along. Running the cartoon reversed, running the cartoon with the frames in the wrong order, running the cartoon upside down, I've done all of those so far, deliberate mistakes designed to make it look like something's gone wrong with the strip.

Ironically something has gone wrong with the strip. GoComics has been refreshing its website and there have been a few teething problems.

I say 'a few teething problems'. Some are more serious than others. The internal navigation going out of order I can live with. The loss of editing on posted comments is an irritation but not a disaster. But having 100 subscribers evaporate into thin air is unforgiveable. I know this has happened because I subscribe to my own strip, and my emailed selection of strips from the main GoComics page and Sharpa has been a mess over the last few days. I get multiple copies of some strips and no Sherpa strips at all.

I'm giving GoComics the benefit of the doubt for the moment - it's a huge database driven site and it's probably a nightmare to update - a tiny bit of code going wrong somewhere in the guts of the system can lead to massive errors when it comes to assembling pages. But I don't have infinite patience.

If you're having problems with the GoComics site I suggest you resubscribe to the strip on the original Sherpa site: http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csmdx or follow this blog instead.