By the fourth or fifth year of Robot Friday, a lot started to change - not just in how I approached the comic, but in my real life as well. And if I'm being honest, the changes I wanted to make in the comic were probably influenced by the shifts happening in my own life.

I had been drawing Robot Friday for a while, and the gag-a-day format that I originally started with had lost its appeal pretty early on. By this point, I had already begun experimenting with short story arcs, usually stretching across two or three strips at a time, but mostly just to deliver a longer punchline than a single strip could handle.

However, I started to feel like the characters needed more depth. I didn't want them to just do things because I wrote them that way - I wanted their actions to feel real and motivated by who they were. For that to happen, I needed to build up to those moments, giving readers a chance to connect with the characters and their situations rather than just observing from the outside.

Having well-developed backstories also made storytelling easier and more natural. Once I truly understood who my characters were and what drove them, writing became less about forcing jokes and more about letting the characters react authentically. In a way, they started writing themselves - if I dropped them into a situation, their motivations and personalities dictated how they would respond, and all I had to do was write it down.

So, during this time, I dove deep into storytelling, creating longer arcs that explored and fleshed out the backstories and motivations of nearly every character in Robot Friday. These backstories didn't just exist in one-off strips - they became a recurring foundation for the comic, shaping future storylines and character interactions for the rest of its run.

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