While looking through my archives I discovered something very interesting; I have more Willow’s Grove than the numbers reflect. Although today’s strip is WG 495, I have up through 502 (for Monday, February 7, 2011) uploaded and awaiting autopublish. If you add the number of strips I found from the past runs of Willow’s Grove (and the name it was before I called it Willow’s Grove…Uncle Cho’s Bar & Grill) in 1989-1990, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2003-2005 & 2008-present, come that Monday mentioned above, I will have presented 782 total strips (Three of which actually never saw the light of day. I inked one and two others were only in pencil as back then, I was publishing on MWF, pre-Wordpress/Comicpress, which meant a lot of manual updates :D). Now my dilemma: How do I accurately reflect the number of strips without cheating the current run while at the same time not ignoring the history, which apparently is richer than I once thought? You may remember I was in a similar pickle nearly 18 months ago when I started doing Sunday strips as an experiment, along with the 2009 Halloween Special along with several holiday one shots…the number just wasn’t reflecting the actual run…so I adjusted it. Do I now go and make the change to the numbers again, and then one day go back and renumber all of the others to match?…whew, that would be a lot of strips to change the numbers on…or do I just jump up in numbers now and not worry about it, or just stay with the current numbering and just have everyone know in the back of their mind, this numbering system is for the current phase of WG (2008-???) but there are 280 other strips that came before? Either way, before this year is out, and if I maintain the current publishing schedule, we will see WG 1000 sometime in early December!

Your comments, suggestions, advice is welcome (just go ahead, leave a comment below)…I do know it is only a number and I know that number is higher than my current audience (LOL) but all the same, it is rather cool to think I’ve been hacking away at this thing for that long!

(oh & btw, I will be scanning the three, never before seen strips from the 2003-2005 run, to ink and post on the history page, as well as the other 277 one day in the future after that…so stay tuned!)