This storyline is taking a while. I’m well aware of it. I knew that it was going to be a long one when I originally wrote it, and that’s part of the reason that I’d kept putting it off for so long. People would ask me “when are we going to find out what Scott is doing in his room?”, and I’d say “soon… maybe next year”. For the past four or five years.

I know that right now particularly, it’s dragging in the day-to-day because it’s an action sequence, and I have to commit page space to showing multiple things happening at once (Ethan getting his ass kicked, and Zeke breaking into the room). These sorts of sequences are not generally conducive to a piecemeal delivery system like this, where you’re just getting one page at a time.

When I sit down to write a story arc, I do my best to put something interesting on every page… be it a joke, a plot revalation, or just a cool panel to look at. However my priority needs to be the big picture… the product as a whole.

I’ve been putting out this storyline for a couple of months now… and that’s a long time when you’re reading it day to day. However after this storyline wraps up, every new reader for the next ten years is going to read this story in the archive. And what took me two months to complete, is going to take them five to ten minutes to read. And they’re going to be reading it as it was intially written… as a whole, continuous story, start to finish.

The action sequences that seem like they’re dragging right now, fly by when you can immediately flip to the next page. And if I were to skimp on them now for the sole purpose of “getting it done faster”, when someone reads it in the future they’ll say “One panel of Ted hitting Ethan? That’s what you call a fight?”

Comparing with how the storyline reads (and how quickly it moves) over these couple of months versus how it’s going to be read for the next decade, I hope you can understand why my priority is the long-term.