Status update
Tag / GoComics
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Just testing to see if there’s anyone still out there. I’ll admit that I’ve been concentrating more on supporting the reruns on Tapas.io while we’re exiled from the main GoComics site. But there’s a small but vocal group of you that want new Smith strips while we’re waiting for GoComics to get its act together, so I’ll keep going. I’ve written enough strips to keep us going through to mid Autumn, and am preparing for the return to thrice weekly strips as soon as GoComics have the infrastructure ready for it…
Pipe
Based on Rene Mageritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images.
Is it a comment on the fact that Smith is not a cat by merely the image of a cat, or a dig at GoComics for Smith’s continued disappearance from their site? I couldn’t possibly say.
But for the record it’s been four and a half months since the Sherpa strips disappeared. And counting…
Glow
The sun reflecting off the windows of the terraces piled up on Hastings’ West Hill is truly a sight to behold.
I don’t have a photo of the actual phenomenon itself, but here’s another photo which will show you how intrusive Morrisons car park is in the views from everywhere else in Hastings. It’s a drone shot of Hastings at night. The crescent in the foreground is St Mary in the Castle, an arts venue in a converted church. The remains of Hastings castle are on top of the cliff, and the terraces and lawns of the West Hill lie behind it. That urine-yellow mass of lights top left is the Morrisons Car Park. Smith and Jones’ housing estate is roughly at the top, in the middle.
About six hours before this was posted GoComics announced that it was going to switch over to its much-threatened new website on the follwing Monday. After a year of hemming and hawing we Sherpa artists were given four days notice that we were to be temporarily evicted from the site, and dropped into a dark corner of the inernet where comments are impossible and search engines never dare venture. Luckily, I’d anticipated this and started an account at Tapastic where I began posting reruns.
To be honest, I’m angry that I’ve built up the comic to the point where it’s the most popular one on Sherpa, and the had that audience snatched from me because GoComics find it inconvenient to update the entire site in one go. In one fell swoop we were removed from the main site and removed from the email feeds and home pages of everyone that had subscribed to us. And we’ve not been given the faintest idea of when we’ll be back on the site and back in the system. And it’s that airy-fairy vagueness about what’s going to happen in the future that really pisses me off. I’m not convinced that they actually know what they’re going to do with Sherpa.
My official response can be seen in the next post.
Smith continues as a weekly strip appearing on Sundays until GoComics get their act together.