What would happen if the background art was extended, so that it won't wrap so much when you use a lot of text? Of course, not every background can be extended easily, but many of them can. I'd be willing to do it, even.

Actually some of my backgrounds were first made extended, but brad said he wanted to save bandwidth.

Yeah, clouds2 actually has a drawing of a naked skydiver if you stretch it too far.

Yeah, originally I liked the idea of extended backgrounds, but the file sizes became a bit big.

How big were they (in dimension)?

I can't remember exactly, but I know some were more than twice the size of the frame.

They wouldn't need to big that big. Just big enough to withstand a few extra lines of text in the dialogue. I wouldn't even extend them horizontally at all—just vertically.

I'm not sure if this is possible without increasing bandwidth anyways but it'd be cool if you extended it too far it would have a mirrored copy of the same image, thus it wouldn't flow well.

Here's an example:

bedroom.jpg: 250 x 350 pixels --> 15,229 bytes

bedroom2.jpg: 250 x 382 pixels --> 15,867 bytes

Thirty-two more pixels gives you two more lines of dialogue, at least on my system. I little experimentation showed that I was able to enlarge the panels twice that much by filling a dialogue box, but the gain in file size still wouldn't be bad if the backgrounds were extended sixty-four pixels. I wouldn't worry about people extending horizontally or filling both dialogue and narration, as that happens very rarely.

Also, I had to guess at the quality of the compression for the JPEG, so I'm not sure if I upped the compression when I did this. It doesn't seem to have compromised the quality of the image, though.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

The last comic contest proved that.

That seems fine to me, Bargaintuan. As long as the file sizes aren't much bigger, I see no reason not to put the larger backgrounds in.

I like the short backgrounds. They make for some interesting overlaps. When I did a "Too Much" comic in the last contest and used snowscape, it looked like the characters were walking on ice.