By year three of Robot Friday, I had settled into my process. The character designs were about as good as they were going to get for a while, and my overall drawing style had developed to a point where I was finally happy with it. I also began reintroducing minor characters from the early strips, giving them larger roles in the main cast, while at the same time pushing my writing further than ever before.

For the first 100 strips, I was simply trying to come up with a joke or a short story one comic at a time. But by year three, I started writing storylines that stretched across multiple strips - sometimes two, three, or even more. Each comic still had its own self-contained joke, but the overall story unfolded gradually, giving me room to develop ideas more fully. This approach not only allowed me to say more but also made the humor feel more natural, which, in turn, helped endear readers to the characters.

Around this time, I also made a big decision: I cut my posting schedule down from daily updates to three times a week. By this point, Karen and I had a serious relationship, we both had day jobs, and we had decided to move in together. My time as a self-employed cartoonist - with all the freedom that came with it - was coming to an end, and I had to adjust my comic around real life. And life, as it turned out, was about to hit hard.

Moving in together was no small task. The logistics of combining two households into one can be tricky, but for the most part, we handled it well. I spent a month packing up my things and putting them into storage before crashing at Karen's tiny apartment for a week while we packed up her place. Then came the big move into our larger apartment. It was a stressful, physically grueling process, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

At 4 a.m., on moving day, I woke up in excruciating pain. It felt like an alien was trying to claw its way out of my bladder. A kidney stone - a legendary one, in the retelling - had decided that this was the perfect moment to make its grand debut.

For the sake of brevity, I won't go into all the gory details, but I will say this: at 4 in the morning, I was crying on my girlfriend's apartment floor, convinced that I was dying. One ER visit and five hours later, I was pumped so full of morphine that you could have hit me in the face with a rock, and I wouldn't have cared. I spent the rest of the day sleeping, and for the following weeks, I was in and out of urologists' offices, trying to figure out what to do about the stone.

Needless to say, all production on Robot Friday stopped.

It took a full month before the stone finally passed on its own, and I have never felt greater relief than I did that day. After 30 days of agony, I actually cried tears of joy.

When I finally returned to Robot Friday, I found myself reinvigorated. Any insecurities or self-criticism I had about the comic before was gone. I was just grateful to be making art and comics again - and to be pain-free. Looking back, I think those post-kidney-stone strips were some of the most fun I ever had making Robot Friday, and I truly believe it shows in the work.

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