Epilogue: Sometimes....

Part of this strip has been planned for well over a year. If I hadn't had Shakra walk out at the end of last year, this would have been it, and spurred on by Mary's fervent insistence, we ended up agreeing to make it the end of this year instead.
There's a certain anticlimax to this strip after the high drama of the last one. Which is also sort of the point.

Trivia fans might like to note that the two-two-three panel layout on this strip was also used on the final strip of last year, at least on the third page of the triple-parter I did for that one. You'll also note that strip also says 'End of Year One', because at some point of this year, during the site redesign, I threw an artist's tantrum and declared all of last year's work utter crap and demanded that it be called 'Year Zero' and this year's work be called 'Year One'. I don't know. It kind of made sense at the time, and kind of does now -- year zero was very much the 'training wheels' period, as opposed to this year, in which Mary and I managed to turn out eighty strips of high quality that all form one long coherent storyline. Some of the metaphorical guns fired in the latter stages of this year were placed into drawers very early on, if you'll pardon the literary allusions.
(I say eighty strips instead of the eighty-three that are actually up because the three-part storyline 'The Talented Mister Halifax', in which he discovers the secret of his continuing employment despite being seventeen months late for work, actually has no bearing on the rest of the year's storyline, and only appears to answer some lingering questions from last year. As such, it's an oddity, but one that doesn't feel hugely out of place.)

Changes are afoot here at Raincannon in the next month: first off we have guest week -- guest writers, mind, and non-Shit Happens strips at that -- and then on the 19th of December, two years to the day since I started this mental-illness-inducing project, Mary takes over as scriptwriter for Year Two of Shit Happens. I'll still be doing the art chores on the strip, but my involvement on the writing side will be limited to the plotting stages. All of the final scripts will be written by Mary -- and hopefully a few more of the rants, as well. (I'll be fair to her: it isn't her fault she doesn't get to do many rants, it's my fault for finishing every single damned strip so late that I need to post it as soon as it's done, which leaves little room for rant-writing.)
In addition to the art on Shit Happens, I'll be starting up another webcomic next year at some point. It's all very much still in the planning stages, but will run alongside Shit Happens rather than instead of it. More news on the side project when it's available.

I'm beginning to understand why some people do three or four panel strips.