Yonkoma Nuzlocke: Fire Red

And we’re launching not fireworks, but this here dedicated Yonkoma Nuzlocke site. As you may know, SmackJeeves, the home of my comic since its launch over seven years ago, has gone to the dogs. Its unfortunate, but I will definitely no longer host my works on that platform – and so, as necessity is the mother of invention, here we are.

Literally a newborn, the site is quite obviously very much a work in progress. The only reason you can access it at all already is because of the New Year’s Eve tradition we have ’round these parts – there’s always one last update on the last day of the year. And hey, it’s a good opportunity to gather your feedback right away, as I dive into actually making this site. Comment below any and all thoughts about the situation and this place.

As I’m writing this, the newest update – strips #429 – #432 – is available for you to read right here, giving you a glimpse of what the comic navigation is gonna be like. I’ve tried to make it as similar as possible to YN’s old SmackJeeves incarnation, without overcomplicating things. Again, it was a very nice site before it… stopped. You might notice that these four strips are the only ones available for now and, yeah, it’s gonna be some tedious (and cringeful) work to reupload every single past strip one by one. If I turn out to be mad enough, I might even try to replicate old comments from SmackJeeves, marking them somehow as special “archive” ones. I’ve said it before plenty but readers’ feedback is beyond priceless and I don’t really want to lose a single bit of it.

Unfortunate as the circumstances are, there are some good news. For one, this site supports the “hover the mouse text” for every comic, something I’ve always enjoyed planting in there. I can now also tag every comic with both locations and characters (and other tags of my choosing), after which searching via those categories becomes possible. Do you remember a hilarious strip, but you can’t for the life of you remember what it was? Well, if it featured Sabrina, just click on her tag and badabing-badaboom, suddenly you don’t have to look nearly as everywhere. With how many individual strips YN has, I imagine it might be pretty useful. It will also make recreating the Cast page (nuked by the SJ changes) simpler – I hope to have every tag feature a description in addition to the appearances.

Next great thing? You can navigate through pages with just the arrow keys on your keyboard. That’s a huge convenience that even old SmackJeeves couldn’t provide and it works especially well with many-small-strips format like yonkoma.

Clearly there’s a lot more to say and even more to do – but for now, I’ll save it. Time to celebrate the yearly transition. I wish you all the best in this upcoming year and I do hope you’ll spend at least a small fraction of it here. I’ll certainly try to make it worth your while.

Have a great one, my Yonkies!