Around the fourth or fifth year of Robot Friday a lot started to happen not only with how I wanted to approach the comic, but in my real life too. If I want to be honest with myself, the changes I wanted to make with the comic may have come around because of the changes in my real life.

I'd been drawing Robot Friday for a while now and the "gag-a-day" writing style that I started the comic off with had become somewhat boring pretty early in. By the fourth or fifth year of the comic I had already begun writing strips in story arcs rather than gag-a-day stand alone comics for a while, but for only two or three strips at a time and really only to hit the reader with a longer joke than one comic would allow.

In addition to story arcs I felt like the characters in the comic needed to be a bit more fleshed out too. I really like to give my characters reasons for doing things other than I'm just writing them to do the things. In order to give characters and situations a reason for being I feel like it's important to also build up to those reasons so the reader has more of a chance to relate to the character or situation rather than being an outside bystander. It also helps me come up with stories and situations more easily if I have a backstory for my characters. By supplying backstories for characters I find that the characters almost write themselves because if I put them in one situation, depending on their backstory motivations, sometimes it's just obvious what they will do next and all I have to do is write that out.

So, I spent a good chunk of this time creating strips with long story arcs that served to flesh out and add backstories to most - if not all - of the characters of Robot Friday, and these backstories and motivations would keep coming up for the rest of the run of the strip as well.

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