Another self-depreacting joke about how badly I draw. Actually, I like the way this first set of hand-drawn comics look. Sure, it's no VG Cats or anything, but it actually looked the way I wanted, more or less. A shame the joke sucked.
As you surely noticed, this first batch of hand-drawn comics has a different format from that of the regular comics and the second set of hand-drawn comics. Almost all the sprite comics are 4 panels long and 1 panel high, a 4x1 panel layout. This is similiar to how almost all multiple panel syndicated comics like Garfield and Dilbert are set up, with a variable number of panels along a horizontal line.
These hand-drawn comics, on the other hand, are all 2x2, which is a common form you might see for online comics, like Ctrl-Alt-Del and Real Life. On the internet, a comic can be limited by how much horizontal room is available on a reader's screen, while vertical space is almost unlimited, as web surfers are used to scrolling up and down while reading a webpage. As such, a 2x2 format or even a 1x4 (four panels arranged vertically), gives the artist more horizontal room in which to work in each panel. According to Wikipedia, the 1x4 structure is common practice in Japanese comics and is known as "Yonkoma" or "4-koma".
At one point, I considered switching all of my comics to this format to help readers with resolutions smaller than 800x600, but I was told rather definitely that the fans didn't like it. These days, there's not much point, since so few people still use a resolution that small any more. Besides, it would break some of the jokes, specifically this one.
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